The Two Words That Will Limit Trump’s Harm To Public Lands, Environment

The Trump administration's undoing will be its own incompetence

“Regulatory certainty.” I first wrote those words about the Trump administration’s efforts to open up ANWR’s coastal plain back in 2020. They’re the reason that the sale of oil leases for that area failed back then, and I think they could be the undoing for much of this new, not much more competent administration’s efforts to destroy America’s natural heritage, biodiversity and healthy environment.

Don’t get me wrong here: A lot of bad things are going to result from this administration’s efforts to undo protections, sell off the places where we hike, camp, fish and hunt, destroy agencies, eliminate regulation, fire federal workers, and expand extraction at the expense of everything else we care about.

Trump’s presidency closes the window humanity had to prevent the worst impacts of the climate disaster. Important parts of nature will be destroyed forever by development. Keystone species will go extinct. Bird populations could face wholesale collapse. Clean air will be made unsafe to breathe and water dangerous to drink. Firing park rangers and other federal workers eliminates some of the institutional knowledge that we’ll need to rebuild, when we eventually reach the other side of this self-imposed crisis. But ultimately, that harm will be limited by the administration’s own carelessness and haste. Trump and his quislings may be good at manipulating the American electorate, but they are still very bad at governing.

One of the awful, shortsighted things the administration is doing is unwinding NEPA. Signed into law by President Nixon in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act is referred to as “the Magna Carta of environmental laws” because it was the first major one of those, and still forms the basis for most subsequent environmental policy.

What NEPA did was establish a review and comment process for federal projects, and those the government permits. When you hear about “red tape” like environmental impact assessments, and public review, and comment periods, you’re hearing about things established and mandated by NEPA, then expanded on by other foundational legislation like Federal Lands Policy and Management Act of 1976.

And all of that doesn’t just work to protect baby polar bears. By ensuring the potential harms created by any new project are established, and the input of all stakeholders considered, the admittedly long, burdensome permitting process established by NEPA also creates that regulatory certainty which is the topic of this article.

I’m going to keep up that baby polar bear thing, for reasons that will become clear a little later on. A major study conducted in the 2000s found that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska holds about 7.06 billion barrels of oil, a little less than the amount of oil used by the entire country in a single year. In 2005 dollars, that oil was worth a total of $374 billion, with a potential cost of $124 billion to extract it.

The point of the study I’m referencing was to determine if the potential for $251 billion in profit could be outweighed by the cost of the harm drilling in ANWR would do to the environment. The methodology employed to calculate this number is complex, but the study found that the cost of environmental harm caused to each and every American of voting age had a mean value of $1,141. That’s nearly $2,000 here in Trump’s “golden age” economy. Again for every single person in America over the age of 18.

Since that study was conducted, more research has been done into the potential harms drilling in ANWR could cause to the environment. It turns out that most of ANWR’s oil lies on its coastal plain, neatly overlapping the area used by polar bears for denning. In order to identify the exact location of the coastal plain’s oil deposits so drill sites can be located correctly, 90,000-pound trucks have to be driven all over it, conducting seismic surveys ever 135 feet. Because we’re talking about arctic tundra here, which turns swampy when snow melts, those surveys can only be conducted during the winter, when polar bears are denning.

Polar bears that den on ANWR’s coastal plane are one of 19 total polar bear populations worldwide. Polar bears are unique in that they are threatened not only by development, but also by the progression of climate change. As the world warms, and sea ice levels plummet, polar bears lose the habitat they rely on to hunt seals. So the goal of polar bear preservation is to maintain as much of the population as possible, until such a time as climate change can be reversed, and sea ice levels restored. And crushing baby polar bears to death by driving 90,000 pound trucks across their dens very much works against that goal.

“ANWR is the most important denning site in the United States for polar bears,” the world’s foremost polar bear researcher, Dr. Steven Amstrup, told me back in 2019. “Piling more stresses onto an already stressed population can only exacerbate that population’s declining status.”

I was speaking to Amstrup back then because the first Trump administration was trying to rush through permitting for oil drilling in ANWR, something it achieved by ignoring the environmental impact statement that spelled out harm to polar bears and more. But even after doing so, and opening up the sale of oil leases, no major oil companies showed up. Why? Regulatory certainty.

Exploiting ANWR’s oil would require those seismic studies, plus the construction of roads, pipelines, drilling sites, and other infrastructure. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that it would take at least 10 years of work before any extraction could begin, with one major caveat: “The 10-year timeline for developing ANWR petroleum resources assumes that there is no protracted legal battle,” EIA states.

With thousands of dollars in studied harm to every person in America, and the visual messaging potential added by the accelerated extinction of cute, charismatic megafauna, I can hear the class action lawyers salivating through my computer screen. And that’s assuming that we re-write the constitution, Elon Musk isn’t killed by a ketamine overdose between now and 2028, that he’s still rich enough after Tesla shareholders throw him out that he’s able to buy Trump a third term, and that Trump still cares about ANWR 10 years from now. And that’s the timeline for beginning oil production. EIA assumes that oil would be produced in ANWR for at least 19 years, by which time America should have a new President.

And those aren’t even all the potential variables here. American refineries often can’t use the type of oil produced domestically, so we rely on importing it from foreign sources. About 20 percent of the oil produced on Alaska’s north slope is exported to China. Trump just imposed tariffs on exports of oil from Venezuela to China, which will likely trigger an in-kind response from that nation. That’s amid the background of a larger trade war, which will have who knows what kinds of consequences to oil prices here and abroad, as well as a capricious administration that’s demonstrating enthusiasm for targeting private corporations with very real retaliatory measures in response to perceived slights.

It’s also worth remembering that oil companies ultimately rely on an ability to sell their products to everyday consumers. I remember pressuring my parents to buy dolphin-free tuna in the early 1990s. And today I’d happily steer my two 12 MPG trucks in the direction of a baby polar bear-free gas station.

Does any of that sound like the kind of situation in which any sane human being or international mega-corp would invest $200 billion into, with a 29-year commitment before complete returns could be realized? We’re about to find out, because, you guessed it, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is rushing through another ANWR lease sale, now without even paying lip service to the NEPA process.

That’s one, very elaborate description of a single project. But the regulatory certainty problems inherent in it apply to most of the rest of the administration’s actions too.

Logging? They say they’re skipping Endangered Species Act reviews for timber projects in order to prevent wildfires. But logging exacerbates fire risk, and isn’t applicable to areas like Lahaina or Los Angeles, which have experienced recent fire disasters.

Mineral extraction on public lands? Trump invoked wartime powers under the Defense Production Act in order to speed permitting, again seeming to skip NEPA and other mandated processes. But we’re not in a war. And it’s not clear if a newly hollowed-out Department of the Interior even has the bandwidth to administer an accelerated number of permits even through laxer restrictions.

I get how scary all this stuff sounds. I am as depressed and overwhelmed by the speed and scope of the harm being done here as any of you. And I’m not arguing that there won’t be plenty of companies lining up to mine, log, or drill for oil and gas in places we wish they wouldn’t. But ultimately in its haste, the Trump administration is preventing the wholesale exploitation of our natural resources, while also handing us the keys to fight against that. The speed and scope demonstrate vulnerability, not strength.

This administration utterly lacks the ability to get any new law through Congress. Republicans couldn’t even get a budget reconciliation package assembled in time to avoid a government shutdown, and barely managed even a continuing resolution that gets them through September thanks to the capitulation of Chuck Schumer. Reconciliation is the only measure through which a filibuster can be avoided in the Senate. That’s why every action mentioned in this article involves an executive or secretarial order, rather than a new law. Trump can write all the EOs he wants, every single one of them can be just as easily reversed by a future president.

At the same time, this administration seemingly lacks the ability to write an order that doesn’t flagrantly violate bedrock laws and longstanding precedent. And as long as they keep making it so easy to sue them, those lawsuits are going to keep coming. I know, I know, the Supreme Court is packed with corrupt, far-right religious extremists, but the ultimate success of these suits is not currently as important as the presence of them. Poorly conceived and written orders do not add up to a conducive environment for business.

I’m going to close this out with something former House Natural Resources Committee chair Raúl Grijalva said to me back in 2020. Raúl lost his battle with cancer two weeks ago, was an ardent defender of our public lands and the environment during his 12 terms in Congress, and was a frequent source of information both on and off-the-record for my articles. Speaking about ANWR back in 2020, he said, “No user of public lands should put any faith in this administration…to provide them with any certainty about anything.”

You can read more about the top photo here. It may be symbolic for our current predicament.

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports independent journalism and gives you personal access to his expertise and network, which he’ll use to help you plan trips, purchase gear, and solve problems. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link.