January, in brief

Key news from January:

• In the first few hours of his second term, President Donald Trump declared a national energy “emergency” and issued executive orders that seek to expand oil and gas production, unravel Biden-era environmental policies, pause wind energy development on federal lands and waters, and withdraw the United States from international climate agreements. President Trump's “Unleashing American Energy” executive order calls for increased fossil fuel production and mining on public lands and waters. Another executive order rescinds many of the Biden administration’s protections for the Arctic, in particular prioritizing exports of American natural gas to foreign countries and attempting to restart oil leasing and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
   
• The U.S. Senate voted 79 to 18 to confirm former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as Interior secretary after his nomination sailed through the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Burgum has tight connections to the oil and gas industry. In addition to helping Trump to secure campaign donations from Big Oil, he held a dinner for fossil fuel executives in North Dakota last year. He has repeatedly emphasized his support for "clean coal" over the course of his confirmation process, as well as pushed the idea that the U.S. has a deficit of "baseload energy" and a surfeit of "intermittent energy" as justification to pause renewable development and prop up fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
   
• President Donald Trump fired the top government watchdog at the Interior department as part of an unprecedented purge of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies. Mark Greenblatt was appointed by Trump in 2019 and served as the Interior Department's IG until Trump fired him. “This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government,” Greenblatt told the New York Times. “We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.” Whether the firings were legal is not yet clear. The Inspector General Act requires a 30-day notification window between the White House informing Congress of its intent to fire an inspector general and that inspector general being removed from on-duty status. The White House must also provide substantive reasons for why the inspector general is being removed.
   
• President Trump issued an executive order to change the name of North America's highest peak, Denali, back to Mt. McKinley. The Interior department confirmed the name change. Then-president Barack Obama changed the mountain's name to Denali at the request of Alaskans in 2015. According to polling cited by Alaska's News Source, two out of three Alaskans are against changing the name back to McKinley and the state's two U.S. senators have denounced the change. Mark Westman, a former ranger on the mountain, said, “The name Denali reflects a local cultural heritage here that predates the United States… The name McKinley was an arbitrary name given for someone who had never even set foot here. He was from Ohio.”
   
• In the final weeks of his presidency, President Joe Biden cemented his legacy as the greatest conservation president in modern history, protecting more federal land and waters than any other president—about 674 million acres. At the start of the month, he designated two new national monuments in California using his authority under the Antiquities Act: Chuckwalla National Monument and Sáttítla Highlands National Monument. Together these monuments add protections for over 800,000 acres of culturally and ecologically significant public land. Named for the native chuckwalla lizard, Chuckwalla National Monument in southern California protects over 620,000 acres of fragile desert ecosystem just south of Joshua Tree National Park. Sáttítla Highlands National Monument protects over 220,000 acres of public land in Northern California. The establishment of Chuckwalla National Monument also completes the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, the largest corridor of protected lands in the continental United States, which covers nearly 18 million acres stretching approximately 600 miles.
   
• The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s land grab lawsuit, which sought control of 18.5 million acres of national public lands in the state. The high court's decision strikes a major blow to Utah's latest attempt to turn over the management of federal public lands. In August 2024, Governor Spencer Cox and then-Attorney General Sean Reyes filed a lawsuit directly with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to declare the management of millions of acres of federal land in Utah unconstitutional, a move that would have had serious ramifications for public lands across the country. The state has paid a law firm over $500,000 of taxpayer money to pursue the suit, and wasted millions more on a taxpayer-funded PR campaign to try to convince Utahns of their misguided effort. In December the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) sued the Utah governor and attorney general for bringing the case to the Supreme Court.
   

What to watch for in February:

• Will Alaska pass a law to keep the name 'Denali' for North America's tallest peak?
• Who will President Trump nominate as BLM Director, and other key Interior leadership positions?
• How will agencies respond to President Trump's executive orders?
• Rally for public lands at the Montana state capitol on February 19, 2025

From the Center for Western Priorities:

Report: President Biden’s final year on public lands

The Center for Western Priorities released a report looking at President Joe Biden's final year on public lands.

Report authors Lauren Bogard and Sterling Homard write that 2024 was the culmination of years of work for the Biden administration on public lands, including the completion of several high priority rulemakings related to federal oil and gas leasing and bonding, renewable energy development, bringing conservation on par with other uses of public lands, regulating methane emissions, and protecting millions of acres in Alaska from future drilling and mining.

President Biden capped off his remarkable year with the announcement of Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands National Monuments in California, pushing the total number of acres he protected using the Antiquities Act to nearly 4.5 million (including the restoration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments) and establishing his legacy as the most consequential conservation president in modern history.

Learn more about President Biden's public lands record, and how he left a road map for future conservation-minded presidents to follow, in CWP's report.

Kate and Aaron are joined by Alan Zibel, a research director at Public Citizen who focuses on energy and environmental issues. He breaks down what Donald Trump and the incoming Congress’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda could mean for public lands—given that the U.S. is already the world’s top exporter of natural gas (otherwise known as methane). 

Kate and Aaron talk to CWP colleagues Lauren Bogard and Sterling Homard about our recent report on President Joe Biden’s final year on public lands, which looks at the president’s conservation achievements over the past year in the context of his full presidential term. They also recap Trump Interior Secretary Nominee Doug Burgum’s Senate confirmation hearing and discuss a new legislative attack on the Antiquities Act.

Kate and Aaron talk through the effects of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders on public lands with Drew McConville, a senior fellow on the Conservation Policy team at the Center for American Progress. His research is focused on energy, public lands, and Alaska.

Aaron and Kate are joined by Mark Squillace, natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado Law School. Professor Squillace provided legal counsel to the Interior department under President Bill Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, and he’s a two-time veteran of this podcast. They discuss the legality of President Trump’s executive orders on public lands, including which are likely to end up in court and whether the Trump administration will have the manpower to implement these orders after making sweeping layoffs.

Emails show Interior secretary nominee Burgum hosted 'VIP dinner' for oil, gas, coal execs 

DeSmog
 

Jimmy Carter's environmental legacy set the foundation for today's climate action

NPR News | Politico
 

Oil companies are not planning to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’

New York Times
 

How Trump-proof is Biden’s environmental legacy?

Washington Post
 

Poll: Utahns, Arizonans show strong support for keeping national monument protections in place

Salt Lake Tribune | E&E News
 

Deb Haaland reflects on four years as Interior secretary

NPR | Albuquerque Journal | E&E News | The Hill | HuffPost | Associated Press | Santa Fe New Mexican | KRQE News
 

Sen. Heinrich: Our public lands are not for sale

The Hill
 

What do the Los Angeles fires tell us about the coming water wars?

The Guardian
 

Opinion: Utah's public lands are safe—for now, but the fight is just beginning

Salt Lake Tribune
 

Trump targets Alaska’s oil and other resources as environmentalists gear up for a fight

Associated Press | Newsweek

“I strongly disagree with the President’s decision on Denali. Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial.”

—Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski on President Trump's renaming of Denali as “Mt. McKinley”, via X