Editor’s Note: The following is the second installment of a three-part series adapted from David L. Bahnsen’s new book, Elizabeth Warren: How Her Presidency Would Destroy the Middle Class and the American Dream. Part I is here.
The subject of energy production on public land has been controversial for many years, with many realists recognizing that significant revenues are available to fiscally strapped state governments via land-lease deals with energy producers. Indeed, oil and gas leases alone generated $1.1 billion of revenue for states in 2018, despite a fall in the number of acres under lease. Of that $500 million went directly into supporting hospitals and public schools in states that depend on the revenue. If that were not significant enough, oil and gas development accounted for 284,000 jobs last year on federal land alone and contributed $60 billion of output to the national economy. Total energy production on federal lands and waters generates a stunning $11.3 billion of annual revenue, with the major beneficiaries being Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, where, observant spectators may note, no Ivy League universities are based, and where cosmopolitan liberalism is not exactly headquartered.
Elizabeth Warren’s response?
Any serious effort to address climate change must include public lands. As president, I would issue an executive order on Day One banning all new fossil–fuel leases, including for drilling or fracking offshore and on public lands.She buries her extreme policy intentions in patently false claims that the current administration is “busy selling off our public lands to the oil, gas, and coal industries for pennies on the dollar — expanding fossil-fuel extraction that destroys pristine sites across the country while pouring an accelerant on our climate crisis.” Even as the quantity of acreage leased for production has been declining year over year, revenue has risen, owing to better yield. Her fear-mongering papers over an ignorance that would lead her to adopt a policy with a dangerous economic impact and absolutely no environmental benefit.
The “Keep It in the Ground Act of 2017,” which Warren cosponsored (and which was dead on arrival in the Senate), was the result of a radical movement that opposes all fossil-fuel development. That movement unsuccessfully lobbied the Obama administration to issue the moratorium that Warren now supports. Even the Obama administration concluded the suggested policy would be destructive and resisted the very efforts that Warren and her Senate colleagues now support. The pendulum swing to the Democratic party’s embrace of economically destructive, environmentally nonconstructive policy ideas has been rapid, to say the least.
True to form, Warren finds a way to blame “profits” for the “problem” of lease revenue helping to subsidize hospitals and schools in the middle-class centers of flyover states: “It is wrong to prioritize corporate profits over the health and safety of our local communities,” she said, as a justification for her proposed drilling ban. This is a textbook case of claiming to protect the very people her policies will most harm, and there’s no ambiguity about it.
I join many left-wing environmentalists in opposing subsidies to fossil-fuel producers (for entirely different reasons). I, of course, have to hold that position, since I oppose all subsidies to all economic actors, believing that the government has no right to pick losers and winners. In the case of federal land leasing, there are billions of untapped dollars, which belong to the citizens of the United States, and which our government has not just the right but the duty to exploit for the benefit of its citizenry. Innumerable checks and balances exist on how these leases are administered, and reasonable people can disagree on the particulars regarding the exact quantity of leases and the amount of acreage, and so on. What is beyond reason is the idea that all public lands should become devoid of economic yield instantly. Such a move would do nothing but shift the production capacity from federal land to private land, all the while decimating the states that would be unable to reap any benefit from their resources.
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