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For decades, the oil and gas industry has benefitted from a leasing system for federal lands and waters that allows operators to repeatedly violate environmental and labor standards with minimal consequences, take advantage of regulatory loopholes to dodge payments, and avoid liability for their activities.
According to a new report from the Center for American Progress, the Biden administration has the necessary tools to hold the industry accountable. The report notes, “The bad-actor practices that oil and gas companies have demonstrated on U.S. public lands and waters can be solved through strong regulations that hold the industry accountable.” In particular, the report highlights the Bureau of Land Management's proposed oil and gas reform rule as a way to ensure companies that profit from public resources act as responsible stewards of those resources through increased minimum bonds, raising royalty rates, and eliminating anonymous expressions of interest in the leasing process.
As of 2022, the oil and gas industry held more than 34,000 leases on public lands, covering more than 23.7 million acres. The report finds that more than 50 percent of the top oil and gas companies have exhibited one or more bad-actor behaviors, such as abandoning wells, shedding liabilities, dodging royalty payments, or committing environmental or labor violations. Many of the biggest companies have multiple subsidiaries that operate under the company’s original name, making it difficult to determine who is responsible for various oil and gas resources and the associated liabilities.
The CAP report calls on the Interior Department “to make companies pay their fair share, clean up the environment, protect individuals and communities at risk from oil and gas extraction, and limit who is allowed to extract resources from shared U.S. lands.”
New blog: What's in the Interagency Working Group report on mining?
In a new blog post, Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Rachael Hamby digs into the details of a report released by the Biden administration’s Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Mining Laws, Regulations and Permitting. The report recommends a suite of important reforms to the laws, regulations, and policies that govern mineral exploration and development on national public lands. While the IWG’s recommendations are promising, they won’t make a difference unless they are implemented. Regulatory and policy changes can only address the symptoms of the underlying problem—our continued reliance on the General Mining Law of 1872, an outdated and inadequate legal foundation that has remained unchanged for over 150 years.
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What we know is air pollution and those fine particles you breathe in is bad for all of us. It can have whole-body effects, not just breathing.”
