Trump officials to slash public input on fossil fuel drilling on federal

The Trump administration is attempting to shrink public comment periods for fossil fuel leasing on federal land while shifting the financial risks of cleanup to taxpayers and allowing for more planet-warming emissions. It’s part of a broader effort to dismantle public input processes and save polluting companies money, advocates say.

“By ignoring public comment [requirements] while propping up companies,” said Alexa Dietrich, research director at the science advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists, “they’re really attacking democracy in a very clear way.”

The interior department said this week it wants to loosen two Biden-era regulations governing oil and gas drilling on national public lands. One would dramatically lower the fees that firms must pay for future cleanup costs before drilling; the second could allow companies to release more methane, a potent planet-warming pollutant.

The changes would also mean the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – part of the interior department – would no longer be required to assess whether swaths of land proposed for oil and gas leasing have high potential for conflict with other resources such as wildlife habitat. And the proposal would slash the public’s ability to weigh in on oil and gas permitting.

Currently, the BLM must give the public 30 days to weigh in on which tracts of land will be made available in a lease sale. Officials must also draft National Environmental Policy Act documents for each sale, providing an additional comment period of no less than 30 days. Once notice for a lease sale is published, BLM must provide a 30-day “protest period” to allow for additional public input,” amounting to at least 90 days of public participation in total.

If the revisions are finalized, the need for those first two public comment periods would be eliminated completely, and protest periods would last just 10 days instead of 30. That would mean the public would not be able to weigh in on environmental reviews before they are finalized, said Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the national environmental advocacy non-profit Center for Biological Diversity.

“A 10-day protest period is also insufficient for the public to weigh in when there can be dozens of lease parcels in a single lease sale, each with unique resource concerns,” she said. “It’s crucial for the public to be able to have time to raise concerns about specific resources on the ground, especially because BLM staff are not oftentimes necessarily familiar with conditions on the ground and what the effects might be of their decisions.”

In an emailed comment, an interior department spokesperson said: “The proposed revisions to the oil and gas leasing rule streamline outdated procedures that have slowed the development of reliable, domestic energy in accordance with BLM’s multiple use and sustained yield mission.” And in a…