Interior moves swiftly on climate change
WASHINGTON — As the Interior Department awaits its new secretary, the agency is already moving to lock in key parts of President Joe Biden’s environmental agenda, particularly on oil and gas restrictions, laying the groundwork to fulfill some of the administration’s most consequential climate change promises.
Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico, Biden’s nominee to lead the department, likely faces a showdown vote in the Senate later this month amid vocal Republican concern for her past positions against oil and gas drilling. But even without her, an agency that spent much of the past four years opening vast swaths of land to commercial exploitation has pulled an abrupt about-face.
The department has suspended lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico under an early executive order imposing a temporary freeze on new drilling leases on all public lands and waters and requiring a review of the leasing program. It has frozen drilling activity in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, delayed Trumpera rollbacks on protections of migratory birds and the northern spotted owl, and taken the first steps in restoring two national monuments in Utah and one off the Atlantic coast that former President Donald Trump largely dismantled.
As early as this week, one administration official said the Interior Department is poised to take the next steps in preparing a review of the federal oil and gas leasing program.
Even critics of the administration’s agenda said they have been surprised by the pace of the agency’s actions.
“They’re obviously moving forward quickly and aggressively,” said Nicolas Loris, an economist who focuses on environment policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
That aggressiveness, along with Haaland’s history of pushing to shut down fossil fuel drilling and pipelines, has put the agency in the line of fire from Republicans and the oil and gas industry.
“I almost feel like your nomination is sort of this proxy fight over the future of fossil fuels,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told Haaland during her confirmation hearing last week.
The Environmental Protection Agency will ultimately take center stage in the regulatory battles over climate change because it is the lead agency policing emissions from the electricity and transportation sectors — the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
But the Interior Department, which decides when and whether to sell publicly owned coal, oil and gas, is at the heart of the always contentious fight over keeping such resources “in the ground” — that is, whether the vast majority of America’s fossil fuels should remain untapped to avoid dangerous concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Biden already has appointed nearly 50 top Interior officials across the vast agency, many of them veterans of the Obama administration, adept at pulling the levers of policy. They include Kate Kelly, who spent six years at the Interior Department before going to the liberal Center for American Progress, where she focused on public lands policy; and Laura Daniel Davis, who served as chief of staff to former secretaries Sally Jewell and Ken Salazar. This time around, she is a principal deputy assistant secretary over land and minerals management.
Perhaps the most significant driver of the agency’s most aggressive early action, supporters of the administration said, has been David Hayes, who served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations as deputy secretary of Interior. Hayes worked on Biden’s transition and ahead of Inauguration Day was tapped to be a special adviser to the president on climate change policy.
“These are people who know how to get things done,” said Sarah Greenberger, interim chief conservation officer at the National Audubon Society.