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With President-elect Donald Trump about to take office, America’s national monuments are once again in danger. Project 2025, the policy handbook written by former Trump officials, clearly lays out a plan to roll back national monument protections and eliminate the Antiquities Act, which presidents from both parties have used for over a century to protect some of America’s most iconic landscapes.
Early in his first term, President-elect Trump attempted to illegally reduce the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, a decision largely motivated by oil and gas, coal, and uranium interests. This move was wildly unpopular at the time, even with Utah voters. A CWP analysis of over 650,000 comments posted to regulations.gov found that 98 percent of comments expressed support for keeping or expanding national monument designations.
A new blog post from Center for Western Priorities' creative content and policy manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein demonstrates how year after year, voters across the political spectrum say they want more emphasis placed on conservation than energy production, along with more protections for public lands. Specifically, they support presidents of both parties using the Antiquities Act to protect special landscapes as national monuments.
Despite widespread political divides, Americans can agree on one thing: they want their public lands to remain protected for future generations, and they won’t appreciate the assault on public lands likely to come in the next administration.
Biden signs order to open federal land to data centers
President Joe Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that directs the departments of Energy and Defense to lease sites to the private sector for a build-out of "gigawatt-scale" data centers. According to the White House, the move is in response to a boom in artificial intelligence and is intended to protect national security and bolster clean energy by requiring tech companies to use renewables, nuclear, or fossil fuels with carbon capture to support AI data centers' electricity needs.
The construction of new data centers to support growing AI needs will require a lot of power: The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates data centers could account for 12 percent of the country’s electricity use by 2028. While Biden's order couples the build out of data centers and their associated electricity usage with new clean energy generation, President-elect Donald Trump has pushed for more oil and gas drilling to power data centers. At a press conference last week, Trump called data center technology a “hot item” and said he would seek expedited environmental reviews for business leaders like Hussain Sajwani, a real estate developer in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, who plans to invest $20 billion to build data centers in eight states.
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No matter who is in charge in Washington, D.C., they are not above the law and not above their obligations to protect our lands and waters. In the lease sales being planned for this year and beyond, I am looking to the BLM to uphold the standards and values set forth by the oil and gas rule and to follow the law.”
