With just days until President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of the Interior finalized a report Wednesday calling for major changes to the federal coal program by which the U.S. manages the leasing of land to companies for exploration and production across 570 million publicly owned acres.
A year ago, new leases were placed on hold pending this report. Trump, who campaigned as an ally of the coal industry, has pledged to reverse that controversial moratorium.
Interior Department lands, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, are estimated to contain 7.4 billion tons of coal that could be mined and sold. Environmental groups have charged that if these fossil fuel resources are actually dug up and burned the consequences could be severe for the planet’s climate, and continual domestic coal leasing had also come into increasing tension with President Obama’s ambitious climate change policies.
At the same time, domestic coal production has declined dramatically in recent years because of major changes in U.S. electricity generation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the decline has been from nearly 1.2 billion short tons in 2008 to 743 million in 2015.
“It appears that modernization of the Federal coal program is warranted,” stated the report, a so-called scoping document that sets the stage for a broader environmental impact assessment of the coal program. “While energy markets, communities, environmental conditions, and national priorities have changed dramatically, the program has remained fairly static in its administration over the last thirty years.”
The new report sketches out a series of potentially ambitious changes to the current federal coal leasing program, which has not been updated since the 1980s. Those reforms would include charging a higher royalty rate to companies, factoring in the climate impact of the coal being burned through an additional charge to firms and setting an overall carbon budget for the nation’s coal leasing permits.
SOurce:washingtonpost