Trump’s review is cynical politics, not sound policy.

High Country News
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

By Brian Calvert/High Country News

I have been trying to find one good policy reason for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to go after national monuments, but the fact is, there are none. Zinke, a pro-energy Montanan who speciously claims to be a conservationist, is undertaking an unprecedented review of national monuments dedicated under the Antiquities Act at the behest of President Donald Trump. He will deliver his recommendations for shrinking or rescinding a hit-list of monuments on Aug. 24.

But his review is a sham, and so is the presidential directive that ordered it. Here’s the reasoning the president gave in April for ordering the review: that monument designations can “create barriers to achieving energy independence, restrict public access to and use of Federal lands, burden State, tribal, and local governments, and otherwise curtail economic growth.” These are demonstrably untrue, so let’s look at them in order.

President Donald Trump displays his signature on an executive order to review monuments around the country. Secretary Ryan Zinke stands at left, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, second from right. U.S. Department of Interior

In terms of achieving energy independence, only a few monuments sit atop commercially recoverable hydrocarbon formations, and in most cases the lease-holders can continue to develop the energy deposits with or without a monument. That’s if they want to: Prices for coal, oil, uranium and natural gas are low enough that new drilling just doesn’t make financial sense in many of these places. A look at the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency shows formations around the Four Corners, throughout Wyoming, and into far eastern Montana. These are broad maps, and different well sites will produce different results, but few of the monuments sit atop these plays. Those monuments that do overlap with extractive plays won’t make a difference. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, the U.S. is drilling, digging, sucking and pumping the heck out of the West already — so much so that prices for natural gas, oil, and coal are all relatively low, thanks to a glutted market. So there really is no energy-related reason that monuments should be messed with.

>>>Read the rest of the analysis looking at Zinke’s argument around public access to land and the notion that less protection will lead to more economic growth.

Brian Calvert is the editor-in-chief of High Country News. Follow him on Twitter @brcalvert.

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High Country News

The nation’s leading source of reporting on the American West.

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