Recent Projects

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently issued a notice of intent to complete a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for an oil and gas leasing plan within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) Coastal Plain. We submitted comments explaining how BLM’s previous EIS fell short of the agency’s obligation to assess the effects of oil and gas leasing and to consider reasonable alternatives.

A proposed oil and gas lease sale in Colorado would offer over 45,000 acres in areas valuable for recreation, wildlife, environmental conservation, and tourism. We submitted comments explaining how the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) environmental assessment neglects its duties to manage public lands for multiple uses and consider more limited leasing scenarios.

In 2017, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) repealed an Obama-era rule that tightens environmental regulations for fracking on public lands. We filed an amicus brief detailing BLM’s irrational analysis of the repeal, which erases the rule’s significant net benefits and flouts longstanding standard practices.

Despite being ordered to provide a more thorough analysis of greenhouse gas emissions by a U.S. district court, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) failed to adequately consider emissions from a number of oil and gas leases in Utah. We submitted comments recommending that BLM use the social cost of carbon to weigh climate impacts and, further, assess the option value of deferring lease sales to improve its land management decisions.

As the climate crisis intensifies, it is crucial that we effectively contextualize and consider how policies affect our climate. We have worked hard to ensure that governments, regulators, and courts account for the social cost of carbon in policy and decisionmaking—and a string of recent policy outcomes has created positive momentum.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced its decision to exclude 87,000 acres of public lands from an upcoming lease sale, agreeing with arguments raised by policymakers and environmental advocates, including Policy Integrity, that these public lands are too valuable for other uses to be designated for fossil fuel extraction.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California vacated the Bureau of Land Management's repeal of an Obama-era rule that was designed to reduce wasteful venting of methane from natural gas operations on federal lands. The court ruled in part that it was arbitrary for the Trump Administration to have reduced the estimate of the social cost of methane from $1300 per ton down to just $176 per ton by excluding from consideration any climate effect occurring outside U.S. borders. Policy Integrity has worked for years to build the case against the so-called “domestic-only” estimate of climate costs.

A proposed oil and gas lease sale in Utah would offer over 100,000 acres located in areas valuable for recreation, wildlife, environmental conservation, cultural use, and tourism. We submitted comments detailing how the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental assessment neglects its duties to manage public lands for multiple use and consider more limited leasing scenarios. BLM also ignores the option value of delaying the leasing decision and, therefore, is unlikely to obtain fair market value for the nominated land parcels.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its environmental assessment of a September 2020 lease sale in the Royal Gorge Field Office region of Colorado. We submitted comments asking BLM to monetize the real-world climate impacts of projected emissions using the social cost of greenhouse gases.

The Pecos District Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released an environmental assessment of a 2020 oil and gas lease sale in New Mexico. Despite calculating that foreseeable leasing activities would produce over 28 millions tons of downstream CO2-equivalent over a 20-year time horizon, BLM fails to monetize the real-world impacts of those emissions. We submitted comments encouraging BLM to estimate climate impacts using social cost of carbon metrics.