Trump picks Pearce to run Bureau of Land Management
Also: Drill, baby, drill continues during shutdown; appropriately sited solar
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
The Trump administration has nominated Steve Pearce, a hard-right Republican and former congressman from New Mexico, to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Pearce’s political career was infused with hostility toward public lands and the BLM, so, as one would expect for these guys, Trump chose him to oversee those lands and head up the same agency.
Pearce has opposed new national monument designations, is a fan of drilling public lands, has tried to weaken or eliminate the Endangered Species Act, lied about wolves in an effort to defund the Mexican wolf recovery program, received a 4% score from the League of Conservation Voters. … the list goes on.
You may remember that Trump’s first pick to helm the BLM didn’t work out so well. Soon after his inauguration, he nominated oil and gas lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma to fill the post and carry out his “energy dominance” agenda on public lands. But Sgamma pulled out after it was revealed that in the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots and invasion of the U.S. Capitol, Sgamma wrote that she was “disgusted by the violence” and “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s first-term pick, William Perry Pendley, was never confirmed due to his checkered past, and was found to unlawfully be serving as acting director.
If confirmed, Pearce would probably be involved in determining whether the Trump administration will revoke a ban on new oil and gas leasing within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park’s boundary. The Biden administration implemented the ban on the urging of Pueblo leaders to keep drilling away from the park and Chacoan-era Great Houses that surround it, but to which the national park protections do not extend.
The Navajo Nation initially supported the leasing moratorium, as well, but under the Buu Nygren administration reversed itself after allotment owners within the buffer zone protested, saying the ban would indirectly hamper drilling on their allotments and cut into their royalty income.
Project 2025, the extreme right-wing’s playbook for the Trump administration, called for revoking the leasing moratorium, and doing so certainly fits with Trump’s “energy dominance” and “drill, baby, drill” agenda. Late last month the Interior Department informed tribal leaders it was moving forward with and sought their input on possibly re-opening the land to the oil and gas industry.
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Meanwhile, the BLM is busy auctioning off oil and gas leases on public land in the Greater Chaco Region just outside the buffer zone around the park.
This week (yes, during the government shutdown), the agency leased about 3,100 acres of land to oil and gas companies in the San Juan Basin. This was regardless of multiple formal and informal protests opposing the lease sale, including ones from environmental groups, the Torreon/Star Lake Chapter of the Navajo Nation, and Sovereign Energy, a Pueblo women-led organization committed to advancing tribal energy sovereignty and protecting sacred landscapes.
“The BLM’s continued approval of lease sales in and around the Ojo Encino, Torreon/Star Lake, and Counselor Chapters not only perpetuates harm to frontline communities,” Sovereign Energy wrote, “but also demonstrates a systemic failure to uphold federal trust and treaty responsibilities. These lands are not vacant or disposable — they are the living homelands of Indigenous peoples with profound cultural and ceremonial importance.”
One parcel received no bids, while the bidders on five others will pay just $10 to $12 per acre for the exclusive right to drill them. A seventh parcel, in Rio Arriba County, received a high bid of $501 per acre.
The agency is planning a June auction to lease a 160-acre parcel and a 671-acre parcel in the Greater Chaco Region. The larger tract is a few miles northeast of Lybrook and the other one is about seven miles southeast of Lybrook in piñon-juniper-strewn hills.
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The federal government shutdown may be depriving thousands of workers of paychecks, imperiling food stamps and other benefits, and leading to delayed and cancelled flights nationwide, but it isn’t stopping the Trump administration from implementing its “drill, baby, drill” agenda.
The BLM has issued 628 drilling permits for federal lands since the shutdown began, according to the Center for Western Priorities’ oil and gas tracker, including 530 in New Mexico, of which seven were issued by the Farmington Field Office for drilling in the San Juan Basin (the rest were for the much busier Permian Basin).
Rig counts remain relatively low, which indicates that oil and gas companies are snatching up as many drilling permits as they can while the getting is good, but may not use them anytime soon.
🔋 Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌
Parts of the agriculture-heavy Delta County in western Colorado could certainly be described as pastoral or idyllic, with the rows of vineyards and fruit orchards beautifully framing the West Elk and Ragged Mountains in the background. In summer (and even in November, this year), hay bales sit in freshly cut green fields and sparkling yellow and flame-orange cottonwoods rise up along stream and ditch banks.
So when I heard a couple years back that the Delta County commissioners had put the kibosh on a proposed utility-scale solar project, in part because it would defile prime agricultural land and views, I was somewhat sympathetic. It would, indeed, be atrocious to wipe out a viable orchard to make way for a sea of solar panels. That said, I was a bit flabbergasted, too, since Delta County is normally pro-private property rights to a fault (I doubt they’d deny an industrial-scale feedlot or chicken farm or, for that matter, a coal mine), and because the region needs new, clean energy sources to replace and displace natural gas and coal generation.
Eventually the county relented — in part because the proponents agreed to design the project to allow for sheep grazing — and approved the project. Now the Garnet Mesa solar project is complete. I went and checked it out last week, and it wasn’t until I actually saw it that I understood where, exactly, it is — and how my concerns about it wrecking idyllic farmland were misplaced.
Don’t get me wrong: Garnet Mesa has a distinct, spare sort of beauty to it. Its wide-open spaces afford lovely views of Grand Mesa and the other mountains in the distance, and there is an occasional irrigated hayfield here and there (along with patches of the aforementioned cottonwoods). But the ash-gray soil has very high levels of selenium, making growing things difficult, and the whole area has long been a sort of sacrifice zone and dumping place for dilapidated single-wides, old cars, and various other detritus.
It is the kind of place, in other words, that a developer might expect to be able to put up a solar project — even a really big one — without much resistance, especially on private land that hadn’t been in agriculture for years, if ever. But these days it seems that there’s a sort of knee-jerk opposition to almost any solar development, large or small, on relatively undisturbed public lands or long-abused private lands. And that’s really too bad.
Certainly developers, even of “clean energy,” should not be given carte blanche to build wherever they see fit. And they absolutely should look to brownfields, industrial rooftops, parking lots, and other already-developed areas to put their energy installations, first. But the fact is, we’re never going to be able to generate enough clean energy to displace coal and natural gas without some utility-scale installations on land that isn’t a rooftop or a parking lot.
Admittedly, the Garnet Mesa project is striking looking, and I have to agree with a friend’s description of it as “totally industrial.” But it’s also got its own aesthetic appeal to it, it doesn’t mar the long-distance vistas, and the fact that those panels are generating enough power to electrify some 18,000 homes without burning or emitting anything is super cool, if you ask me.
📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐
Krista Langlois has a nice and heartbreaking piece in High Country News reflecting on the ICE raids in Durango, the subsequent protests, and the violent response to the protesters.
Jerry Redfern continues his strong reporting for Capital & Main on oil and gas industry misdeeds in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin with a story about the Hodgson ranching family that is butting heads with Hilcorp Energy. The Hodgsons used to have a decent working relationship with the oil companies, but when Hilcorp moved in and acquired ConocoPhillips’ assets, things went downhill. Now, the Hodgsons — along with their neighbors Don and Jane Schreiber — are pushing back and trying to get Hilcorp to clean up their act. It isn’t an easy row to hoe by any means.
NM LAWS coalition is hosting a screening of Annie Ersinghaus’s new documentary, The Land of Sacrifice: The Burden of New Mexico’s Oil and Gas Extraction on Nov. 22, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Totah Theater in Farmington. After the film, there will be a Q&A with a panel of local experts and advocates. Check out the trailer below.
I just finished watching The Lowdown, Sterlin Harjo’s new tv series, and I gotta say: It’s really damned good. I highly recommend it.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
I recently joined Kate Groetzinger and Aaron Weiss of Center for Western Priorities to talk uranium mining and the so-called nuclear renaissance. You can listen to our discussion here or, if you don’t mind looking at my made-for-radio mug, you can watch it by clicking on the image below.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
