Fossil Fuels and Public Lands: How the US Interior Department Can Act on Climate Right Now

Those of us who work on climate action, whether it be reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow warming or addressing the impacts of the warming that's already baked into the system, we tend toward the somber. We're optimists, or we wouldn't be doing it at all, but circumstances can sometimes dampen our outward enthusiasm, to say the least. So to hear the president's cabinet talk about climate change daily, to see the White House hiring some of the best and brightest climate minds in the country, to hear federal agency staff describing how climate change interacts with every aspect of their public service mission has been, dare I say, thrilling.

Not to say that all of a sudden we have a grasp on this thing, but after four years of dangerous denial and a shameful disregard for public service, just making the effort to understand the breadth of the problem and establish interim goals feels like the Great Enlightenment.

Making actual gains is another matter, however, and nowhere is this better illustrated than at my old agency, the Department of the Interior. And that's because the agency responsible for our legendary national parks, for the protection of our nation’s fish, wildlife, and plants, for generating world-class science, and for supporting the well-being of our nation's first inhabitants is also the agency responsible for leasing and permitting onshore and offshore fossil fuel extraction. In a time of rapid, human-caused climate change, the enormous agency that manages one fifth of our national land area is a house divided, and therefore a house diminished…for now.

Given the enormity of the multiple crises we now face, from the climate crisis to the biodiversity, social justice, and public health crises, we can't afford to muddle through with a conflicted Interior Department. It is of national interest to unify the agency around a common purpose to both protect the land—our national life-support system—and the American people whose health and well-being are at risk....