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. 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.
We also submitted comments on BLM’s failure to weigh the climate impacts of the leasing decision. Despite projecting that the proposed lease sales would result in more than 24 million tons of greenhouse gases in total downstream emissions, BLM does not monetize the subsequent climate impacts using the social cost of carbon.
In November, we submitted protest comments reiterating our arguments and noting BLM's failure to respond to comments made at the proposal stage.