When most Americans think of federal lands, pristine
national parks like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone come to
mind. But American taxpayers actually own much more than that—nearly 650
million acres, almost 30 percent of the land area of the U.S. Among
other uses, the government leases tracts to energy companies for far
less than fair market value, some as low as $2 an acre, and they in turn
run lucrative, carbon-based resource extraction operations that produce
nearly a quarter of U.S. energy-related emissions, and nearly 4 percent
of global carbon emissions. On Monday, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) will release a
report
titled “Public Lands, Private Profits: How the U.S. Government is
Giving Away America’s Shared Natural Resources to the Wealthiest
Companies in the World” that contends the U.S. government’s leasing
system is “antiquated,” allowing carbon extractors to take advantage of
fire sale prices while also exacerbating global warming. Researchers at the San Francisco-based environmental nonprofit combed
through U.S. Bureau of Land Management lease records and found some of
the world’s largest conglomerates—Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and Royal
Dutch Shell among them (RAN dubbed the top federal leaseholders “The
Filthy 15”), along with many smaller, independent energy
companies—holding millions of acres for the purposes of fracking,
drilling and coal mining, all leased at “nominal” fees. Even the Mormon
Church’s tax-exempt financial arm is in on the action. The report points to what it calls “shady dealers,”
including Colorado-based Cloud Peak, the fourth largest leaseholder of
federal lands for coal development. Cloud Peak operates almost
exclusively in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, where the current plan
could lead to 28 coal leases involving more than 100,000 acres of
public land and more than 10 billion tons of coal mined, exported and
burned over the next two decades, according to the report. “Cloud Peak’s shady method is to sell its own coal cheaply within its
network of thirty subsidiary companies, pay royalties to the government
on these low-cost transactions, and then export the coal to sell at a
higher price in Asia,” the report states. “This way, Cloud Peak doesn’t
have to pay royalties on the true value of the coal that its
subsidiaries receive in foreign markets. Cloud Peak also owns some of
the cheapest rights to mine for federal coal, and pays Indigenous tribes
even less for rights to mine on their land.”...
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