(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump has ambitious plans to utilize U.S. federal lands for the extraction of natural resources.
But Trump – who promised at the Republican National Convention in July to “drill, baby, drill” if he were to be reelected – may not be able to accomplish the vast majority of his plans due to existing protections and the way federal lands are defined, environmental law experts told ABC News.
Trump won’t be able to “just turn on the spigot” for new oil and gas drilling on day one of his administration, Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, told ABC News.
“Every administration gets to the place where they have to differentiate between the rhetoric that they use in the campaign and the actual challenges when it comes to actually governing,” Stan Meiburg, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability, told ABC News.
National parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, military reservations and public-domain lands are owned and managed by the federal government.
Public land is intended to be used for public benefit, but for the last century or so, that definition has sometimes been conflated to also include the extraction of natural resources, such as oil, gas, minerals and timber, according to Peter Colohan, director of federal strategies at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a nonpartisan think tank.
Federal lands are “for the benefit and enjoyment of all people,” Colohan told ABC News, evoking the famous phrase by former President Teddy Roosevelt that’s inscribed on the arch at north entrance of Yellowstone National Park.
Trump carried out what environmentalists widely regarded as an anti-environmental policy regime during his first term, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement to address climate change upon taking office in 2016 – which he has said he plans to do again, reversing President Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021 action to rejoin the agreement – removing clean water and air pollution protections, and fast-tracking environmental reviews of dozens of major energy and infrastructure projects, such as drilling and fuel pipelines, which Trump has said would help boost American energy production and the economy.
During his next term, Trump also has promised to drastically increase fossil fuels production in the U.S., despite the U.S. already producing and exporting a record amount of crude oil under the Biden administration.
“I think it’s an absolute certainty that Trump is going to push to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 19.3 million acres in northeastern Alaska that provides critical habitat to several species, to unfettered oil drilling, as well as areas outside of the refuge along the Alaska coast,” Kierán Suckling, executive director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told ABC News. “He’s been gunning for that for years.”
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to an ABC News request for comment on this story.
Regulatory challenges
The president and the executive branch may have a “great deal of discretion” over control of public lands and monuments, but existing laws to protect lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be difficult to overturn, Suckling said.
Since the 1970s, a slew of environment regulations have been put in place to protect the U.S. landscape, such as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, followed by the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The Clean Air Act was established in 1963 and has been amended several times since, the first time in 1970.
Because of this legal environmental infrastructure, it would be virtually impossible for Trump to easily or unilaterally change these protections, the experts said. In order for the Trump administration to overturn regulations against use of protected lands for energy production, he would have to present evidence to demonstrate that the proposed actions would not violate existing environmental laws, Suckling said.
“You have to use the best science available and if the science does not support your policy, the law is not going to permit you to do it,” Suckling said.
The day after Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden moved to narrow the scope of the lease in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, signed by Trump in 2017, to limit oil drilling. The Biden administration found “legal deficiencies” in the leases that would have made it possible for the Trump administration to expand fossil fuel production, Colohan said.
The biggest roadblock to Trump’s plans to drill on federally protected lands is whether or not those areas are actually economically competitive, compared to places where people are drilling on private land using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, Meiburg said.
However, most federal lands are not protected, Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice, told ABC News. For such unprotected lands, it’s possible for Trump to issue an executive order to lease them for energy production. Even so, whenever a decision is being made to lease public land, “there will be a legal battle for sure,” Colohan said, adding that executive orders are “more reversible” than an existing statutory regulation.
Environmental activist resistance
In order for Trump to open federal land for leasing, his administration is required by law to notify the public, with environmental lawyers certain to be ready to challenge him.
“Environmental laws are carefully designed to produce a stable, democratic, scientific outcome,” Suckling said. “You can’t just get in and jump around and do whatever you want, and that’s why the United States has one of the best-protected environments – one of the cleanest, healthiest environments of any nation on earth,”
During Trump’s first term, the Biological Center for Diversity sued his administration 266 times and won about 90% of those actions, Suckling said. Earthjustice filed about 200 lawsuits against the Trump administration and won about 85% of them, according to Caputo.
“We’re going to have to sue their pants off every chance we get,” the Sierra Club’s Manuel said.
The Trump administration will likely face opposition from other stakeholders as well, such as Native American tribes, which could be impacted should federal land be leased for energy extraction, Meiburg said.
Trump’s loss in the 2020 election may have been the speed bump needed to thwart his agenda for federal lands, some experts also said. Now that he’s been reelected four years later, he’s essentially a one-term president and many of his proposed actions could be tied up in litigation for years, Suckling said.
Conversely, had Trump had eight consecutive years in office, it may have afforded him the continuity to enact more sweeping changes regarding use of federal lands, Caputo said. Should the House or Senate flip to Democratic control after the midterm elections, Trump’s agenda would likely be blunted even more, Manuel said.
However, it’s also challenging for land managers and environmental agencies when there’s constant turnover in the regulatory environment because it can slow progress for environmental protections, Colohan said.
All land is under pressure – whether for development, extraction of resources, agricultural use, climate change or biodiversity loss, Colohan said. But federal lands carry the ideal of conservation for the public benefit, recreation, cultural purposes, and for climate mitigation and resilience, he added.
“Those things are the better, the longer-term benefits that come from conservation,” Colohan said. “And so that’s really a choice that’s made by every administration.”
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