Susan Montoya Bryan/AP Photo
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland addresses a crowd during a celebration at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico, November 22, 2021.
In March, the Bureau of Land Management submitted its fiscal year 2021 report on “Public Land Renewable Energy” to Congress extolling the Biden administration’s goal to site 25 gigawatts of solar, wind, and geothermal energy on public lands. Public lands, the report noted, have a unique role to play in meeting the administration’s goal of a carbon-free sector by 2035.
Five months later, President Biden’s embrace of renewable energy project siting on public lands is on life support. The danger signs began flashing last year, when the administration started backing away from a seamless clean-energy transition. Biden’s campaign promise, widely celebrated in climate and environmental circles, to end fossil fuel leasing on public lands (a pledge punctuated with three periods no less), went poof, finally sacrificed as a gift to Joe Manchin in exchange for reviving the president’s sputtering climate agenda.
Despite Biden’s issuance of a January 2021 executive order pledging to halt new oil and gas leases, the White House went ahead with previously negotiated deals, including drilling in half the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve and swearing off trying to reverse President Trump’s lifting of an Obama-era freeze on coal leases. In July, the administration announced that it planned to pursue leases in Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico after halting them.
So the administration had already veered way off a clean-energy transition course on public lands, whether because of the threat of lawsuits or the scarcity of oil and gas as the Russian attack on Ukraine raged. The Inflation Reduction Act codified that climate-averse decision-making. Under the bill, if the federal government fails to offer at least two million acres onshore and some 60 million acres offshore for gas and oil production annually for leasing for the next ten years, rights of way cannot be granted for any utility-scale renewable-energy project on public lands or waters.
Since the federal government historically has offered vastly more land for leasing than fossil fuel producers have procured for production, the actual repercussions on public lands may be less than feared. It’s unclear whether oil drillers will actually want any new leases. Oil and gas production primarily occurs on private land these days, most of the choice spots are already sold off, and investors aren’t all that interested in new exploration anyway, mindful of losing their shirts during the pandemic crash. But over the long term, it does severely restrict the possibility of siting renewables on that public land.
Renewable-energy supporters have grudgingly accepted the IRA as the price of doing business to get zero-carbon technologies closer to parity and ultimately supplant fossil fuel generation and stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis. But in communities where extraction takes place, and certainly will continue with these siting requirements, the IRA was a gut punch.
The Indigenous Environmental Network called the IRA “a distraction from the need to declare a climate emergency, while allowing polluting industries to continue business as usual.” The NDN Collective, an Indigenous philanthropic group, blasted the linkage of clean energy with fossil fuels in a letter to President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “When it comes to offshore drilling, the coupling of the expansion of oil and gas with the development of renewables, is not only morally unsound but a betrayal of this Administration’s pledge to combat environmental racism and destruction.”
Renewable-energy supporters have grudgingly accepted the IRA as the price of doing business.
In northwestern New Mexico, Mario Atencio, the Greater Chaco energy organizer for Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, has helped battle three administrations to try to stave off new oil and gas leasing projects that encroach on Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a UNESCO historical site, and threaten acres of archeological and cultural sites and the health and well-being of local communities. In a vast region where more than 40,000 oil and gas wells scar more than 90 percent of available land, solar is also gaining ground with a 300-megawatt privately sited solar and battery energy storage facility surrounded by federal lands.
Two years ago, Atencio was ecstatic about Biden’s campaign pledge. But he called the IRA public-lands provisions “high-level horse trading.” “The world is being transformed and the people that needed the most are getting nothing,” he says. “The money’s flowing directly to Houston or some other big major hub. It is signaling to us that we still have to keep our guard up, all this after four years of Trumpism … it’s sad that we have to fight the Biden administration.”
Though the March 2022 BLM report notes that “early engagement with Tribes through government-to-government consultation is being emphasized and implemented through early outreach and virtual meetings on rulemaking efforts and project proposals,” Atencio expresses disappointment with the bureau’s public engagement. “We have been fighting to get consultation, not listening sessions, but real, meaningful consultation with local leaders and local communities to really talk about these ideas. BLM will not talk to us. They are just doing the very legal minimum that fits a check-the-box process.”
Though the IRA bubbles over with tax incentives designed to stabilize long-term market prospects for renewable energy, sector leaders admit that the deal amounts to a business-as-usual trade-off. But since the federal government has been largely AWOL on climate, IRA is a big deal. The United States has “got to get serious about climate change,” says Gregory Wetstone, the president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy. “And this bill represents, really, for the first time, us getting serious.”
An analysis by the independent research firm Rhodium Group estimates the IRA can cut net greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. from 31 to 44 percent below 2005 levels by 2030—with a central estimate of 40 percent below 2005 levels (under current policies, the country would only see declines of 24 to 35 percent).
The IRA also relies on curbing consumer demand for energy through carrots like electric-vehicle tax credits and rebates for energy-efficient appliances. But given that the adoption rate for electric vehicles remains constrained by price sensitivity, this offset remains a tricky one to rely upon, particularly as consumer spending remains low.
The International Energy Agency’s path to net-zero emissions by 2050, however, is predicated on no new fossil fuel field production. The IRA takes the United States boldly in the opposite direction. Leaving open the possibility that oil and gas interests will jump into their newfound federal opportunities with gusto, especially if more global supply shocks materialize, flies in the face of progress to keeping the planet at below 1.5 degrees of warming.
But that northwestern New Mexico is an energy sacrifice zone means little to the powers that be some 3,000 miles due east. “We are getting monsoon rains now,” says Atencio, the environmental organizer. “The roads are washing out; the bridges are washing out. Oil and gas companies that come in, they look at the horrible roads and they just drop gravel where they need it the most and they keep trucking on.”
