One of Obama's Biggest Climate Change Obstacles Is His Own Administration

By Rebecca Leber

In February, a Bureau of Land Management field office in Cedar City, Utah, released a report assessing the environmental impact of leasing 41,000 acres of federal land in Beaver County for oil and gas development. One sentence in particular, in the final appendix of the 69-page document, infuriated environmentalists. In a reply to a comment letter submitted by the nonprofit WildEarth Guardians, the report stated, "At the present time, there is a substantial amount of professional disagreement and uncertainty as to what impacts greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have on climate and, as a result, it is not possible to determine what social costs, if any, could be caused by emissions of GHGs."

Most climate scientists, of course, would disagree that there's any "uncertainty" surrounding the fact that greenhouse gases cause climate change. The BLM's boss would disagree, too. Last month, President Barack Obama ordered federal agencies—including the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), which oversees the BLM—to cut greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade by 40 percent from their 2008 levels.

No government agency will have a tougher time meeting that deadline than the DOI, which manages more than 500 million acres of lands across the country—bigger than Texas, California, and Alaska combined—and another 1.7 billion acres offshore. The fossil fuel energy that’s developed from these lands could be responsible for as much as 24 percent of the U.S.’s climate change emissions; the lands account for 40 percent of the nation’s coal production (concentrated in the Wyoming and Montana's Powder River Basin), and 23 percent and 16 percent of oil and natural gas respectively. Federals lands also include national forests and pastures, which help absorb greenhouse gas emissions, but overall the lands contribute nearly four-and-a-half times more carbon to the atmosphere than they absorb.

This makes the Department of Interior crucial to the future of climate change action, but the agency—the BLM in particular—only haphazardly considers climate change in its everyday decisions. How can the administration lead by example when one of its departments is responsible for nearly a quarter of all U.S. emissions—and seems to have no intention of reducing fossil-fuel development? It's a question more and more environmentalists are demanding that Obama answer.`

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