A Quarter of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Come From Public Lands

Just a week later, the U.S. Geological Survey released another report with a different, though related, message: Nearly a quarter of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from public lands, due to oil and gas drilling and refining, transportation, and most of all, coal mining. "The true costs of opening these beautiful wild places to destructive drilling and mining are far greater than any short-term revenues," Randi Spivak, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Public Lands Program, told Greenwire. "Zinke is using public lands as a cash cow to reward oil companies and other polluters, and he's locking us into a future of climate chaos." In 2016, the Obama administration’s interior secretary, Sally Jewell, ordered the USGS to collect data on greenhouse gas emissions associated with the extraction and burning of fossil fuels from federal lands. The agency focused on federal holdings both on- and offshore between 2005 and 2014 and found that an average of 23.7 percent of annual nationwide carbon dioxide emissions stem from energy sector activity in these areas. Coal extracted from public lands accounted for 60 percent of those emissions, though the report notes a shift away from coal toward natural gas during this 10-year period...MORE

The feds own 29 percent of the land area in the U.S., and this report covers both onshore and offshore, so 23.7 percent doesn't seem like such a bad number to me.