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As the Biden administration pushes an aggressive climate change agenda to confront environmental crises, the Interior Department has emerged as a key player in enacting that agenda. Interior oversees on and offshore energy exploration and production in the United States, giving it wide leverage over the oil and gas industry and its associated emissions. Research has found that about 25 percent of the country's carbon emissions come from oil and gas produced on public lands.
A review of the oil and gas leasing program is one of the first steps through Interior to address climate change, and President Biden has also proposed reassessing outdated royalty rates for drilling on public lands or eliminating industry tax breaks.
Interior Secretary Haaland, has said she understands how Western states depend on drilling revenue. At the same time, “I also recognize that demand and energy innovations are diversifying and so are states’ revenue sources and economies,” she said. “We have to reduce the reliance on the booms and busts of the oil industry.”
Joel Clement, a former Interior official and now senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, agreed. “Eventually, the Department of Interior is going to have to get out of the business of checking boxes for drilling permits and use federal lands to ease that transition to clean energy,” he said. “There’s nothing in the department’s authorizing language that precludes that. It’s just politics and agency culture. And it’s a heavy lift.”
Recent struggles over Interior Department leadership nominations is another example of how the agency has become a climate change battlefield. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Joe Manchin recently weighed in to endorse the moderate Tommy Beaudreau for Interior deputy secretary. Beaudreau was the first director of the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management during the Obama administration, and environmentalists in Alaska have praised his record as a conservationist and his ability to listen and compromise. The White House is expected to nominate Beaudreau for the position today.
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With so many ways to meet the 30x30 target, we can choose to protect places that simply get us to 30 percent, or we can choose places that also serve other purposes, like addressing health disparities, reducing exposure to pollutants, improving water or food security, making nature more accessible, or diversifying income streams in rural economies."
