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A new report from the Center for Western Priorities analyzing President Joe Biden's conservation record over his first two years in office finds that, so far, the Biden administration is long on promises and short on action.
“While President Biden has much to be proud of, his record on land protection lags behind what President Barack Obama and even President Donald Trump had accomplished, with help from Congress, at a similar point in their first terms,” writes Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities and author of the progress report.
Presidents Obama and Trump had both protected millions of acres of public land by similar points in their presidencies. President Biden, by contrast, has added less than 400,000 acres of new durable land protections during his first two years in office—50,000 acres at Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado and 346,000 acres of wilderness and national conservation areas in Nevada that were designated when he signed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.
And while the report credits the Biden administration with modernizing the federal oil and gas leasing system via the Inflation Reduction Act, it notes that the administration faces a looming deadline to formalize these changes with a durable federal rulemaking to ensure they remain in place.
“Realistically, it takes at least a year for any major rule to go from the draft stage to being finalized,” Weiss writes. “That means if the Biden administration hopes to lock in reforms to the oil and gas leasing system and protect them from repeal under the Congressional Review Act, it must publish those draft rules by this March or April at the latest.”
Biden reinstates Tongass protections
In a much-anticipated decision, the Biden administration has banned logging and road-building on around nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska. The new rule reverses a Trump-era decision to remove protections for the pristine Alaskan forest that were first imposed in 2001.
The area is important as habitat for species such as cedar, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees and 400 species of wildlife, including bald eagles, salmon and the world’s greatest concentration of black bears. It is also a major carbon sink, storing more than 10 percent of the carbon accumulated by all national forests in the United States, according to the government.
“The old-growth timber is a carbon sink, one of the best in the world,” said Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake, which sits on the forest's edge. “It’s important to OUR WAY OF LIFE — the streams, salmon, deer, and all the forest animals and plants.”
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Although the President has made historic progress towards combating climate change and clearing the path for an energy transition, the Biden administration must dramatically accelerate its land protection and rulemaking efforts if the president hopes to campaign on or leave a lasting legacy on America’s public lands in 2024.”
