It’s hard to understand why Senate Republicans want to sell off the nation’s important and amazing public lands. However, they’re hyping an effort to sell huge swaths of public lands to private developers.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has released its revised portion of the huge GOP budget reconciliation package. The text not only reinstates language mandating the sale of public lands in more than 10 western states, but it vastly increases the acreage of those required sales.
The new language would force the sale of millions of acres of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, much more than the about 500,000 acres of land sales in Nevada and Utah called for in the original House version of the budget reconciliation bill. That language, introduced by Rep. Mark Amodei, (Rep.-Nev.), was removed from the House version of the bill due to bipartisan opposition in the House and objections from the public.
“Senate Republicans are taking a second bite at a rotten apple,” Athan Manuel, director of the Lands Protection Program for the Sierra Club, an environmental organization, said in a statement. “The American people made it clear last month that they will not tolerate selling off our public lands to billionaires and corporate polluters.”
The Senate bill revives proposals to increase drilling in the Western Arctic and to construct a private industrial road in Alaska that would cut through Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. It also includes a “pay to pollute” provision allowing a methane gas export company to pay a fee in exchange for LNG projects being classified as in the public interest.
LNG exports have devastating climate impacts while diminishing domestic energy supplies and raising prices for American consumers, Manuel said.
For months, many Congressional Republicans have supported selling off public lands as one option to pay for extending Donald Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires. In an April vote, a majority of senators rejected a measure that would have prevented the sell-off.
Manuel said the Senate bill would give billionaires and corporate polluters free rein to drill, mine, and log treasured public landscapes without oversight or accountability, and sell millions of acres of public lands to private developers, locking out American families forever.
“The American people will remind Trump and his Congressional allies that our public lands shouldn’t have a price tag on them,” he said.
