Revealed: the full extent of Trump’s ‘meat cleaver’ assault on US wilderness | Environment

What has happened at Bears Ears is not an exception. Under Donald Trump, the government has auctioned off millions of acres of public lands to the fossil fuel industry, the Guardian can reveal, in the most comprehensive accounting to date of how much public land the administration has handed over to oil and gas drillers over the past four years.

US land Trump opened up for oil and gas drilling

Leases sold for oil and gas

Leases offered for oil and gas

Guardian graphic. Source: The Wilderness Society

US land Trump opened up for oil and gas drilling

Leases sold for oil and gas

Leases offered for oil and gas

Guardian graphic. Source: The Wilderness Society

US land Trump opened up for oil and gas drilling

Guardian graphic. Source: The Wilderness Society

While the US government is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of how public lands should be used, Trump has stacked the administration with former fossil-fuel lobbyists and conservative activists. Often, the department sells access to these lands at rock bottom prices and in places that are sacred to tribal communities, important to imperiled animals, and critical to prevent runaway climate change.

New research conducted by the Wilderness Society Action Fund, and shared with the Guardian, has found:

• Of the more than 600m acres of US public land, the Trump administration has leased 5.4m acres – an area the size of New Jersey – to oil and gas companies.
• Drilling from the leases could result in the equivalent of 4.1bn metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions – heating the planet as much as more than 1,051 power plants burning coal for a year.
• Trump has sought to remove protections in some of the most ecologically sensitive places in the country, from the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska to the Lower Rio Grande Valley national wildlife refuge in Texas.
• The interior department has also leased 4.9m acres in the Gulf of Mexico to drillers, which could have the same climate impact as putting a million more cars on the road for a year.
• Should Trump win another term, leasing may grow. A total of 50m acres are being made available to drillers in proposed plans for public lands.

“Throughout his term, the president has stripped protections from wild places that provide critical habitat for many plants and animals, clean water and offer fantastic opportunities for recreation and exploration,” the Wilderness Society explains in a new report. “Once they are sold off to the fossil fuel industry, sometimes for as little as $2 an acre, these lands will be scarred by drilling rigs, roads, pipelines and pollution wherever drilling occurs.”

An interior department spokesman, Conner Swanson, argued that the Trump administration had leased the least amount of acreage of any administration since the leasing data was first collected in 1985, but he did not respond to a request for that data.

The Trump administration has in fact offered almost as many acres for drilling in four years – almost 25m acres – as the Obama administration did in eight years. The acreage ultimately leased by oil companies under Trump is a fraction of what was offered, in part owing to unfavorable market conditions for fossil fuels, and is comparable to Obama’s record.

The influence of industry-aligned pressure groups in Bears Ears exemplifies a broader trend under the Trump administration.

For the Hopi, Bears Ears “is their church and altar”, said Patrick Gonzales-Rogers, the executive director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. The Hopi and their allies sought to protect Bears Ears “in the same way you would protect the cathedral at Notre Dame”.

Yet the government rode roughshod over the objections of Native Americans to cater to a handful of special interests, including the uranium mining company Energy Fuels, which lobbied to shrink the monument in the hopes of future mining opportunities, and the Sutherland Institute, a Utah thinktank.

Founded to “trumpet” conservative principles, Sutherland has received more than $1m from Koch Brothers-linked foundations and millions more from other wealthy benefactors. It is a member of the State Policy Network of influential conservative ideological groups, many of which advocate for weakening federal environmental laws and transferring federal lands to state control.

In 2016 and 2017, it helped lead a concerted pressure campaign against the Bears Ears monument – flooding news outlets with quotes and op-eds, publishing videos and organizing a rally in Washington. A Sutherland staffer even drafted language that the Utah legislature approved calling on Trump to eliminate protections for Bears Ears.

Throughout 2017, Sutherland also maintained steady communication with interior department appointees, exchanging talking points, research and press releases about Bears Ears and sometimes even obtaining inside intel about forthcoming decisions, according to public records obtained by the Guardian. “This is fantastic; thank you for sharing!!” wrote an interior appointee in an August 2017 email in response to a Sutherland report attacking modern monument designations. Sutherland did not respond to a request for comment.

“The lobbyist-filled Trump administration didn’t just carve and cut corners for these oil-funded front groups,” says Jayson O’Neill, of the Western Values Project, a conservation group, “it gleefully took a meat cleaver to our national monuments and land protections.”

In December 2017, Trump traveled to Utah to deliver the conservative thinktank world a victory. Surrounded by GOP officials and activists at the state capitol, he announced the effective abolition of Bears Ears monument.

The Hopi and four other tribes vowed to fight back and sued in federal court, where lawsuits are ongoing.

But for America’s public lands, Bears Ears was just the beginning.