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With just three months remaining in the Trump administration’s first term, an ongoing tracker by the Center for Western Priorities finds the Interior Department continues to advance environmental rollbacks despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The tracker, launched in January 2020 and based on federal websites and databases, finds 90 policies Interior is seeking to implement, including efforts to expand fossil fuel development on public lands and further weaken protections for wildlife.
Of those 90 policies, the department has finalized seventeen, including weakening air quality standards for offshore drilling and finalizing land use plans to allow increased development on land cut from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. The analysis also identified 36 proposed or completed U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service actions to remove or downgrade protections for plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act.
"With just three months left, Secretary Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, is racing to shred every conservation policy he can. The question now is how much they can get done,” said Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Jesse Prentice-Dunn. “The only silver lining is that, in their rush to grant drilling and mining corporations favors, the Trump administration has finalized flimsy regulations and implemented changes via means that have been routinely slapped down by the courts. Recent rulings that oust William Perry Pendley from the BLM and throw out extraction-friendly land management plans implemented by him demonstrate the unstable legal footing of Trump’s Interior Department."
Mega-fires predicted by scientists are arriving early
Scientists predicted climate change would fuel the kind of devastating wildfires that the West has seen this year. However, researchers did not expect to see mega-fires this soon. Instead, they anticipated seeing fires on the scale of 2020 emerging over the course of the next 80 years, demonstrating that climate change-heightened disasters may be arriving sooner than anticipated.
As climate change continues to exacerbate wildfire dangers, new types of fire behavior have emerged that aren't seen in historical records. The wildfire models that scientists have developed aren't prepared for a rapidly changing world. Rare events are by definition difficult to model due to the fact that there are fewer events to learn from and build off of.
David Saah, an environmental scientist at the University of San Francisco and a leader of the Pyregence Consortium, a team developing new wildfire models, said, “You know how we keep saying climate change is going to change everything? We’re there, we’re in it (and) we don’t know how to quantify it. We’re trying to figure it out.”
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We can conclude with great certainty that impacts of these climate-driven threats are accelerated or are happening much sooner than we thought."
