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Oil Was the Reason to Shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, Emails Prove
In December 2017, Trump announced his administration, at the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, will dramatically shrink the size of the state's two national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Trump's orders mark the largest reversal of national monument protections in U.S. history.
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The Bears Ears National Monument will go from roughly 1.3 million acres to roughly 228,000 — only about 15 percent of its original size. And Grand Staircase will be diminished by roughly half, from its nearly 1.9 million acres to about 1 million.
It was obvious to any critical thinker exactly why this was happening, but now there is proof. This ought to be a major story.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has been focused on expanding oil, gas and coal development and sweeping away Obama-era environmental initiatives that the administration contends hurt America’s energy industry..... the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.
Most of the deliberations took place behind closed doors. The internal Interior Department emails — more than 25,000 pages in total — were obtained by The New York Times after it sued the agency in federal court....
The documents include very specific directives:
From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing, and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as National Monuments.
One April memo, for example, asked Interior staff to prepare a report on each National Monument, with a yellow highlighter on the documents emphasizing the need to examine in detail “annual production of coal, oil, gas and renewables (if any) on site; amount of energy transmission infrastructure on site (if any).” It was followed up by a reminder to staff in June to also look at how the decision to create new National Monuments in Utah might have hurt area mines.
Specific to Bears Ears:
.... an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch.... asked a senior Interior Department official to consider reduced boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument .... to remove land that contained oil and natural gas deposits.... “Please see attached for a shapefile and pdf of a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument,” said the March 15 email from Senator Hatch’s office. Adopting this map would “resolve all known mineral conflicts".... The map that Mr. Hatch’s office provided.... was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions Trump announced in December, shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent.
Specific to Grand Staircase-Escalante:
The internal Interior Department emails and memos also show the central role that concerns over gaining access to coal reserves played in the decision by the Trump administration to shrink the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 47 percent, to just over 1 million acres.
Zinke’s staff developed a series of estimates on the value of coal that could potentially be mined from a section of Grand Staircase called the Kaiparowits plateau. “The Kaiparowits plateau, located within the monument, contains one of the largest coal deposits in the United States,” an Interior Department memo, issued in the spring of 2017, said. About 11.36 billion tons are “technologically recoverable,” it projected.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/climate/bears-ears-national-monument.html