This is The Landscape, your show about America's parks, public lands and politics today. I'm Aaron Weiss with the Center For Western Priorities, thawing out a little bit finally in Denver after a frigid cold weekend. And I'm Kate Gretzinger in Salt Lake City. Well, it's the day after president Trump's inauguration, and we're here to break down the barrage of executive orders he issued last night.
Our guest today is Drew McConville, a senior fellow on the conservation policy team at the Center For American Progress. His research is focused on energy, public lands, and Alaska. Drew, thanks for joining us. Thanks. Good to be with you both. Well, Drew, it was certainly maybe not a surprise last night. It was a bit of shock and awe in terms of the volume of executive orders that we saw last night, night, not just the environment, but, of course, immigration, inflation, a whole lot.
Did what we saw last night in terms of those executive orders line up with what you were expecting? Were there any surprises for you? Yeah. On the one hand, it was pretty shocking and outrageous. Shocking how shamelessly, president Trump was proclaiming that he would do anything and everything to put the interests of oil and gas ahead of anything else.
And that includes walking away from our global leadership on climate, our, clean energy advantage, in the race with China, and that he would direct his political team, really, to find ways around the law, really, all in the name of fossil fuels. On the other hand, you know, it's as usual, this amounted to a whole lot of talk. And, really, we didn't see a lot of action. Most of the actions that matter are gonna come later, and a lot is easier said than done when it comes right down to it. Yeah.
Fair enough. It was there was a lot in there. And reading through them, was very confusing. It was like, can he even do this? It was the thought I had a lot a lot, many times last night. But, let's talk about public lands now. How many of these orders pertained in some way to public lands? And can you sort of give a quick summary of the ones that did? Yeah. There were a few, really, where that are probably most important when it comes to our parks and public lands.
There was, one executive order on, focused on Alaska's lands and waters and resources that was called Unleashing Alaska's Extraordinary Resource Potential. There was the declaration of a national energy emergency, which has implications for, for drilling and mining on public lands. And, there was a pretty lengthy executive order called Unleashing American Energy that had to do with, that has implications for drilling, mining again on public lands and waters.
There was also, a couple of executive orders, one in particular, that revoked past, kind of a laundry list of of past orders from the Biden administration. And that those had implications as well, including for this national conservation mission that president Biden launched, with a lot of support and for our efforts to fight the climate crisis too, in particular. Obviously, a lot of big flowery language, especially in those titles of things like unleashing extraordinary resource potential.
But maybe the silliest there is this notion that there is an energy emergency since as we've noted many times on this podcast, oil and gas production in America is higher than it has ever been in history. So why say that there's an emergency, if there's certainly, no shortage of energy going around? Yeah. And there's not only that, you've got oil and gas companies sitting on, you know, decade of unused leases, something like that.
And at the same time that he's saying we're in the midst of an urgent energy crisis, he says, but we don't really wanna do anything about wind and solar. Actually, on wind, we wanna shut it all down and immediately halt any new approvals of, both offshore or and onshore wind. So it it doesn't line up with the rhetoric for sure. Why is he doing that?
You know, I think it's pretty clear when you when you dig into it that what this is about is trying to give any excuse possible to his political team to find ways around the law, in order to advantage, the oil and gas and and mining industries that he, seems to be looking out for here. And he's specifically calling out, ways looking for ways around the Endangered Species Act, looking for ways around clean water protections, clean air,
and other other ways. And so calling it an emergency, even if it's not an emergency, seems like what what he's trying to do here is, look for ways around the law. Right. So following from that, the, unleashing American energy, of course, is sort of, I guess, his response to the made up energy emergency. What was in that EO and sort of which parts of that really touch on public lands? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot in that, EO.
It does read like, both a, I mean, it does read a little bit like a special interest, wish list. It also reads a little bit like, a list of the things president, Trump seems to have a beef against, like electric vehicles and wind. You know, and it also amounts to quite a bit of bluster, and a lot of directions to come back to him with reports, and, recommendations of actions and where, you know, ultimately, the the impact will be felt later.
When it comes to you know, one of the one of the first things that it talks about is expanding, drilling and mining on public lands and waters. And, really, what it what it does is basically launch a search and destroy mission with public lands, wildlife, and climate protections in the crosshairs. And it's calling out this, energy dominance agenda that he's talked about before. This time around, he's layering in a new, element of that and call calling for minerals dominance.
And and, basically, he calls out he calls on his political team to look for existing regulations, orders, guidance, policies, and any and the like, really, to look for actions that can be revoked because they're a, quote, unquote, burden, to energy development. And, again, energy development doesn't count, wind and solar.
Just talking about fossil fuels pretty much, as well as reviewing protections of for public lands that are, well, as well as reviewing protections for public lands from, mineral extraction. So here, they're not named. The places aren't named, but we're talking about places like Chaco Canyon. We're talking about the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. That's sort of what's coded in here. And, again, a bit of a search and destroy mission.
Right. It was almost like they didn't know exactly what they wanted to undo, but they were just like, hey. Go look at anything that could be impacting oil and gas production and mining and and figure out how to reverse it. Or they just don't wanna say the quiet part out loud yet because they know that mining in the boundary waters is in fact really unpopular. So we're not gonna say that
explicitly on day 1. Now one of the things they did say explicitly in here is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge called out by name as somewhere that Donald Trump wants to drill. Drew, I know you focus a lot on Alaska in your work. So walk us through what the the the Trump Alaska order in particular is trying to do. Yeah. The Alaska order, more so than the energy, order is very specific, and it is the special interest hit list, really, when it comes to Alaska mining and drilling.
It is talking about the western Arctic and even those areas that where well, even the most special areas, called special areas, right, which are, places like to checkbook lake, this incredible caribou habitat and wetlands area. We have birds from all over the world coming to nest. Almost anybody should agree these places should be off limits to drilling. That's targeted. In fact, for some reason, the executive order calls for revoking the same regulations twice.
So it's going after the western Arctic. It is going after the Tongass National Forest. It's the world's largest intact temperate rainforest, and it's trying to open that up to old growth logging. It's directing the completion of this Ambler Road, which is a a mining, road to a mining project that may someday exist, but it's cracking open, gates of the Arctic National Park and and other protected areas in the process.
As you mentioned, it president Trump seems hell bent on drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most biodiverse spots in the country sorry, in the world. And, even though the oil and gas industry has had 2 bites of the apple and shown no interest no no major oil companies have any had any interest in leasing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. President Trump here is trying to, take another run at it and force drilling in that place as well.
There's one other one other thing in that order that I would call out because it's it's kind of buried in there. But there's, there are elements of that order, that executive order on Alaska that would open up 28,000,000 acres of public lands. He doesn't do it. He's directing the interior department to do this, but to open up 28,000,000 acres of public lands to extract the development, lands that have been close to development since the seventies.
These are known as the d one withdrawals if you're really in the weeds. But, you know, what you need to know is this is an area that's I think it's, like, 37 the size of 37 Yosemite National Parks, amazing wildlife habitat, really important subsistence resources for Alaska Native communities, and more than half of the federally recognized tribes in Alaska have called for these protections to stay in place. And then buried in this executive order, Trump says, no. Let's let's get rid of those.
One of the things that I think got lost in the initial reporting on these executive orders because they are, you know, so wide ranging and he just says do this stuff is the question of can he actually do this stuff?
And because he's the most specific in Alaska, maybe you can just start there and walk us through how much of this is actually plausible, feasible, doable via EO, or how much of this is just telling agencies figure out a way to do this, but good luck finding a way to do that do it legally. Yeah. That it's a great question. It's a lot of talk. It's a lot of,
hey. Look at what I'm signing here in this, on a jumbotron in the, you know, in the arena, actually rolling back, legal protections like he's calling for here, may not be impossible in in some cases. But, what you're talking about are protections that were put in place through a lot of science, getting up that getting a lot of science onto the record, a ton of public input, really years of work, to put in place common sense legal protections for wildlife, for endangered species, for,
special waters. You know, rolling that back doesn't happen overnight. It takes, quite a bit of time for an agency to reconsider a rulemaking like, the rule for the western Arctic. You know, I I talked about the 28,000,000 acres of public lands in Alaska that, so much of the state, wanted to see protected.
You know, the agency, the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, then DOI, you know, they worked for couple of years, considering evaluating the environmental impacts of opening this area up, made a really sound decision on the basis of all that. If they try to rush through, a reversal and just say, oh, we changed our mind, because president Trump told us to, that that
shouldn't hold up in court. And, know, if you look back at what happened in the 1st Trump administration, he lost a lot in court. They they weren't real good at it. No. That part of it. Actually, having stuff follow the law and hold up. No. No. And maybe that's not the point for president Trump. You know? Mhmm. I guess I guess we'll see if he's mainly just interested in the day one publicity.
You know, is is he and his team gonna are they gonna put the work into getting this stuff legally tight and and done? It's hard to kind of imagine. It's hard to imagine that's possible. Sorry about the sound effect in the background there. No problem. Yeah. And and, you were mentioning, you know, rule makings and that those apply to,
you know, the oil and gas drilling. Like, pretty much everything that was done under Biden was done through some sort of NEPA or rulemaking process that would require a process to undo. So I guess I I'm curious, like, do you did any of these really go into effect last night, or is this all just wait and see wait and see what what gets tied up in court? Like, is is there anything that actually happened on the ground? You know, not a lot of this happened immediately.
You know, off the top of my head, what, you know, what the president can do and what a lot of presidents have done is they freeze, you know, ongoing actions. If something was on its way to the be published a rule making was on its way to be published in the federal register, the president, yeah, that he can direct his agencies to stop that and not not advance it and pause, action while they review what the previous administration has done. And that's not uncommon to have happened.
The Biden administration didn't leave a lot till the last minute, though. So a lot of the most impactful and meaningful actions that we've talked about in when we talk about public lands, these things have been done for a while, and those really weren't vulnerable to immediate freeze or pause. We've also seen a lot of the spending on important clean energy projects, on conservation projects. A lot of that stuff has happened, and, you know, facilities are being built as a result.
Manufacturing, is getting back in action in a lot of parts of the country. That doesn't stop just because the president says stop. You know? On the other hand, some some of the federal spending that is, supposed to be happening under the law, including stuff that was passed, in the bipartisan infrastructure law, a lot of Republican priorities were frozen here. And some of that money, is gonna be stuck. And there will be impacts of that, that get felt pretty immediately.
And I suspect, that's gonna be pretty unpopular, especially especially when you're talking about, money to farmers for, voluntary conservation programs. Drought resilience. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're in the middle of some really horrific disasters. And, you know, I I doesn't seem like the time to be hitting the brakes on climate resilience, on wildfire, resilience projects, but that is one of the things we saw happen last night. Okay. So what are you watching for in the coming
weeks? Obviously, there's a a new congress that's getting off the ground, and Trump, I'm sure, is not done with these executive orders. So what's on your radar? Yeah. You know, we we wrote a report fairly recently. Last week, actually, it came out. It was called, 8 ways in special interests are asking president-elect Trump to sell out US public lands.
You know, a lot of what we saw yesterday, looks a lot like a the early steps, towards selling out, selling off our public lands to those oil and gas industries and, the the mining companies, mostly foreign mining companies, that he's putting first here in these orders. But some of the details a lot of the details really remain to be seen. So I'm watching how how that all plays out, including, you know, what rule makings, what safeguards for wildlife and clean water, get targeted.
I'm gonna be looking at those, protected areas that were put in place by this administration and, you know, how the antiquities act itself, which is, a bedrock, law that an incredible conservation tool that, a lot of president Trump's allies have said should go, you know, after, you know, over a 100 years of of being the most important conservation tool we have. So just a lot of, lot of things to watch, those national monuments, and more. Only other thing I'm gonna add there is the who.
Who's gonna be tasked with doing this stuff? We know Doug Burgum, almost certainly gonna be confirmed as interior secretary. Kate McGregor, back for a stint as deputy secretary. But then below that, who's gonna run the Bureau of Land Management? Who's But then, below that, who's gonna run the Bureau of Land Management? Who's gonna be in charge of USGS, which runs this board of geographic names that's tasked with doing stupid things like renaming Denali and the gulf of Mexico.
A whole lot of dumb stuff that we didn't even have a chance to get to here that I'm sure we will eventually. But I think we'll call this great for now. Drew McConville, center, for American Progress. Thank you so much for being back with us and walking us through all the terrible stuff we saw last night. Well, thanks, Kate. Thanks, Aaron. Appreciate you all covering this. Alright. Let's wrap up with a little good news, shall we?
The Environmental Protection Agency has signed a first of its kind agreement with the Navajo Nation to transport 1,000,000 cubic yards of low grade radioactive waste from a former uranium mine near Gallup, New Mexico to an off reservation disposal site. This mine is one of the largest and highest risk uranium contamination sites on the Navajo Nation according to the EPA. In 2020, researchers found that there are over 1200
abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation. And a 2008 study found uranium contamination in 29 water sources across the reservation. The waste removal process will begin in early 2025 and take 6 to 8 years to complete according to the EPA. The disposal facility will be sealed once the cleanup is done. Now this brings up another important point that we are certainly gonna be talking a lot about over the next 4 years, nuclear waste disposal.
Elected officials across the west, and this stretches across party lines, appear to be embracing nuclear energy despite the negative ongoing impact still today of uranium mining and nuclear waste and nuclear processing across the Colorado Plateau, especially in Arizona and Utah and New Mexico, of course.
We're gonna be following this closely because as much as these politicians say they want clean nuclear energy, no one has figured out where to put all that nuclear waste, which is decidedly not clean, and nobody's volunteering saying, yes, please put a nuclear waste dump in my backyard. Well, that's it for this episode. Send us your feedback, podcast@westernpriorities.org, and let us know what you're worried about as the Trump administration moves in.
Thanks again to Drew for jumping on with us this morning, and thank you for listening to the landscape.