Public Lands Are Critical to Any Green New Deal

Chaco Culture National Historical Park, in northwestern New Mexico, was once the center of the world to the Ancestral Puebloan people, who lived in communities across the 2,000-square-mile San Juan Basin from 850 to 1250 A.D. Today it’s the center of a 21st-century clash over energy policy. Over several decades, tens of thousands of natural gas wells have sprung up among the pottery shards and 900-year-old ruins in the area, and the basin is now capped by a plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas—that can be seen from space.

While the park is managed by the National Park Service, much of the rest of the basin is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which leases gas-rich areas to energy companies. Three times over the past two years, the BLM has offered and then withdrawn leases close to the park. Next month, Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona, a Democrat who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, will hold a field hearing to push for a permanent ten-mile no-leasing buffer around the park. But even as he and a small but vocal group of clean-energy advocates in Congress rush to safeguard Chaco and other coveted public lands from energy development, they have their eyes on a bigger prize. They hope that one day soon fossil-fuel development on federal lands will be relegated to an antiquated curiosity. In their ambitious vision, laid out in a February congressional resolution coauthored by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and Ed Markey (D-MA) and cosponsored by Grijalva and about two dozen other members of Congress, places like the San Juan Basin, whose solar resources are just as abundant as their fossil-fuel reserves, will help solve the climate crisis instead of contributing to it.

The Green New Deal resolution—the grandest gesture Congress has made toward climate action in decades, even if it is largely symbolic—is astonishing in its boldness. It calls for no less than weaning the country off fossil fuels within ten years, while ensuring a “just transition” for coal, oil, and gas workers into clean-energy jobs. Critics on both sides of the aisle have derided the resolution, which maintains that everyone should have “clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food and access to nature,” as naive, overly ambitious, and vague. But some energy-policy experts see another, little-discussed shortcoming: while about a quarter of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions come from federal lands, the resolution barely mentions them; the closest it comes is in a trio of short declarations, one that calls for “ensuring that public lands, waters and oceans are protected,” another that calls for “restoring and protecting threatened, endangered and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity and support climate resiliency,” and a third that advocates “restoring natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage” to pull more carbon out of the air.

If the goals of the Green New Deal are to be met, public lands will need to play a central role while the resolution’s concepts are turned into detailed, actionable blueprints, energy-policy experts say.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2393257/green-new-deal-public-lands-clean-energy?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WYM-Saturday-04142019&utm_content=WYM-Saturday-04142019+CID_84c0ef7a2b05abd77f84d6174af7c950&utm_source=campaignmonitor%20outsidemagazine&utm_term=can%20be%20seen%20from%20space