Trump's fossil fuel foxes are guarding the public lands henhouse

Plus: Going down the pipeline wormhole; Funding freeze wrecks the West

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

It’s a cliché, but it’s also accurate: The Trump administration is hiring the foxes to guard the henhouses, figuratively speaking. This week Trump nominated Denver resident Kathleen Sgamma to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Since 2006, Sgamma has been president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group that works to open up more public land to drilling.

Sgamma’s job, in other words, is to lobby lawmakers to weaken the laws that protect human health and the environment in order to clear the way for petroleum corporations to rake in even more profit. That role has often included butting heads with the BLM and suing the Department of Interior on behalf of the industry. And she’s not merely a hired hand, but also a hard-right ideologue, one who, on social media, frequently downplays the effects of climate change, mocks efforts to stamp out institutional racism and foster diversity, equity, and inclusion, lets her fossil fuel-fetish flag fly, and who clearly has never seen a drill rig she doesn’t adore.

Now she will be charged with enforcing regulations on some 245 million acres of the public’s land, while overseeing the same agency that sells oil and gas leases and issues drilling permits to the same companies that have been paying her salary for nearly 20 years.

What could go wrong?

I’ve heard it said that picking a fossil fuel advocate is no different than Biden choosing Tracy Stone-Manning, who worked for environmental advocacy groups. This argument doesn’t hold up because of a stark difference. Energy companies — i.e. Sgamma’s former employers — stand to benefit financially from the BLM opening more land to drilling. Green groups, by contrast, did not reap any kind of monetary gain when Stone-Manning implemented policies that protected the land. In fact, green groups tend to bring in more donations when the administration is hostile towards the environment.

Now if Biden would have chosen a former solar or wind power executive or trade group employee, that would represent the same sort of conflict of interest. And it is valid to argue that someone with a career in federal land management — not an outsider, regardless of their political tendencies — should lead the agency that oversees federal lands.

In this case it may not really matter. Anyone that Trump picked, whether it was William Perry Pendley, Sgamma, or a career bureaucrat, would have had to follow the “drill, baby, drill” and “energy dominance” agenda — and demonstrate their unconditional loyalty to Trump — or risk being canned.

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While Sgamma’s confirmation is almost certain, it is not so evident that there will be a BLM for her to lead.

Elon Musk and his sidekick President Trump have been busy eviscerating the federal government, laying off thousands of employees, withholding billions of dollars of funding for state and local governments, and generally wreaking chaos — purportedly in the name of efficiency. The Western U.S. stands to lose out big time.

The U.S. Forest Service, for example, is expected to fire about 3,400 employees, according to Politico, or about 10% of its workforce. While this doesn’t include firefighters, wildfire prevention jobs are being cut. NPR reports that the Energy Department has also slashed its workforce, including folks keeping an eye on the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and Veterans Affairs is cutting more than 1,000 employees. And the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal entity that runs hydropower dams and parts of the Northwest electrical grid, could lose nearly 20% of its workforce, raising safety and grid reliability concerns.

The administration also froze hiring for many agencies, which includes seasonal National Park Service workers. That has raised the specter of chaos at busy, understaffed parks this summer. The administration has backpedaled somewhat, saying they will hire for “certain” positions, though they haven’t released details.

Some 264,000 residents of Western states are employed by the federal government (this doesn’t include the Department of Defense), including 30,000 in Colorado. Many of those jobs are potentially on the chopping block.

The administration has also been withholding funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction laws passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in 2021 and 2022. This includes about $560 million for Colorado that was allocated for electric vehicle charger infrastructure, home electrification and energy efficiency programs, grid resilience, and the Solar for All program.

Nevada was promised $156 million for its Solar for All program, which was designed to bring rooftop and community solar to low- and moderate-income households. Trump froze the funds, then unfroze them, then refroze them, leaving the program, which was about to launch, in limbo. Other states have gone through a similar herky-jerkiness, with an emphasis on the jerk part. Courts have ordered the payments to resume; Trump and J.D. Vance have indicated they will defy those orders, a violation of the Constitution and the checks and balances that, yes, make America great.

There are probably folks out there who support these firings and funding cuts because you just don’t like solar or electric vehicles, or think the national parks and forests have too many rangers running around in them, or who kind of enjoy watching forests and neighboring communities go up in flames. Or maybe you believe that the government should be run more like a business and more efficiently, which often includes mass layoffs to please shareholders.

But 3,400 jobs, whether they are cut from a corporation or the Forest Service, are still 3,400 jobs taken out of the economy. And it’s 3,400 people deprived of their livelihood. And that $560 million, regardless of what it funds, is money coming into the state that creates jobs, supports local businesses, and — in the case of the solar program — would cut electricity bills for hundreds of residents. In the North Fork Valley of western Colorado, the future of a proposed agrivoltaics — which mixes solar panels and crops — project is in doubt due to the freeze.

In other words, these federal programs and jobs are good for states’ economies. And when those funds are cut off, where do you think they go? Do you think that Musk and Trump will use that $560 million they saved to cut a $93 check to each Coloradan? Nope: They’ll use the savings to justify cutting taxes, again, for the wealthy and the corporations.

And what of this ideal of running the government as if it were a business? If you were to take the concept to its logical end, if you were to aspire to turning the government into a lean, efficient, money-making machine, then you’d have to get rid of public roads, firefighters, cops, libraries, water systems, food safety regulators, flight controllers, public lands, and, well, all that other great stuff that doesn’t make a profit.

Which is probably one of the goals here. By hollowing out the government, its agencies, and the services it provides, Musk and Trump are creating a justification for privatizing everything that is public, whether it’s firefighting forces, highways, or the public lands. They continue to conspire to make an America by and for the ultra-wealthy.

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🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

A Moab Times-Independent article about an explosion that occurred along the Mid-America pipeline during a 1998 expansion.

Jon Harvey, a Land Desk reader and an associate professor of geosciences at Fort Lewis College, sent me down a pipeline wormhole this week. In a comment on last week’s pipeline-focused Messing with Maps dispatch, he let readers know he had assigned his Fort Lewis College class to map and analyze the pipeline, but was having a hard time finding the origin story — if you will — of said pipeline. I was interested, too, and wanted some more insight into why a natural gas pipeline was carrying gasoline.

One of the things I learned is that the history of the line sort of follows the history of oil and gas development in the Interior West. So for all of you infrastructure nerds out there, here we go:

In 1979, MAPCO, Inc., (aka Mid-America Pipeline Company) proposed constructing 1,172 miles of pipeline to move 65,000 barrels per day of mixed-stream hydrocarbons — i.e. natural gas liquids — from Wyoming, Utah, and the San Juan Basin to Hobbs, New Mexico, and into Texas, where it would join up with a larger distribution system.

Map of the proposed Mid-America Pipeline from the 1979 EIS.

This was during the Carter administration when, on the one hand, public lands protection rules were tightened and, on the other, the government was going all out to achieve “energy independence,” in part by encouraging more federal land drilling and coal mining. The second energy crisis — this one triggered by the Iranian revolution — was well underway, sending oil and gasoline prices sky high and American politicians scrambling for more domestic energy sources.

Because the line crosses oodles of public land, the BLM had to do an environmental impact statement. The EIS process included scoping meetings in various towns along the route, from August through November 1979, just weeks after Carter had given his famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech. Some communities expressed concerns about damage to wilderness areas, and the National Park Service insisted it go around, not through, Arches National park. But in Durango, according to the terse summary, “the consensus was that the line had been well routed.”

From the 1979 Environmental Impact Statement for the Mid-America Pipeline construction.

MAPCO ultimately got the federal go-ahead to build the line, and operated it until 1997, when Williams purchased the company and its assets. At the time, according to SEC documents, the line was bringing in $716.4 million annually. In 1998, Williams set out to expand the line to carry 125,000 barrels per day, which entailed constructing a new, parallel-running 412-mile pipeline that extended from Vernal, Utah, to Huerfano, New Mexico. The project was riddled with delays and other mishaps. And in December 1998 a contractor’s bulldozer ruptured the live gas line near Moab, sparking a huge explosion that injured several people, shut down a highway, and forced evacuations from Arches National Park.

In 2002, Enterprise acquired the Mid-America Pipeline; by then the Rocky Mountain segment included a total of 2,548 miles of pipe. In the ensuing years, Enterprise increased the capacity, to 275,000 barrels per day in 2007 and to 350,000 barrels per day in 2014.

In the meantime, the market for hydrocarbons had shifted, both geographically and in terms of commodities. A nationwide natural gas glut led to a prolonged price slump that slammed the industry in methane-rich areas like the San Juan and Piceance Basins. Meanwhile, global oil demand shot up, bringing prices and rig numbers with it. There was no longer much of a need to ship Wyoming natural gas to Texas.

So, in 2024, Enterprise converted some of the pipeline’s capacity to carry refined products — i.e. gasoline and diesel — in the opposite direction. It now moves as much as 60,000 barrels per day from Texas Gulf Coast refineries to various terminals throughout the Southwest and Rocky Mountain areas. This includes a massive, new 400,000-barrel storage hub and truck-loading terminal adjacent to I-70 near the Utah-Colorado line. Fuel was on its way there when 23,000 gallons of it spewed into the ground in folks’ backyard and water wells south of Durango last December.

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⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

It looks like the Four Corners area is finally finding some relief from what was looking to be an unusually dry winter. A real San Juaner moved into the area last night and the snow is piling up. Forecasts called for feet of white stuff in the high country, prompting CDOT to preemptively shut down Hwy 550 over Molas and Coal Bank passes. Red Mountain Pass remained open as of early Friday morning, even though it looked like this:

Source: Cotrip.org

About ten inches stacked up in Durango, even, causing schools to call a snow day(!) Still, one storm, even a big one, won’t be enough to bring snowpack levels in the southwestern areas up to normal. But for the rivers’ and water users’ sake, here’s hoping this could be just the first of many whoppers this late winter and spring.