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Many in my state recognize that it is time for the people of Wyoming to look to the future. Right now, we have a unique opportunity to rebuild our economy and restore our lands. It’s time to look toward next steps that are sustainable and stable. While fossil fuels have provided much to Wyoming for several decades, they have not always lived up to their promise of security and prosperity and they certainly cannot provide that going forward. The Biden administration's halt of leasing on public lands offers us a chance to assess the impacts fossil fuels have had on our environment and the health of our communities, and make necessary changes to ensure a safe and prosperous future.
In Wyoming, a critical first step is to immediately focus on cleaning up the damage in our communities and to our environment. Our country’s fossil fuel dependence has led to significant pollution here in Wyoming, with reduced air and water quality that has harmed human health. Fossil fuel development has damaged wildlife habitat and contributed to the loss of biodiversity. Now, we are left with thousands of idle and abandoned oil and gas wells that continue to contaminate our environment. In 2019 alone oil and gas companies reported 823 spills, averaging out to about 2 spills per day.
The oil and gas industry must be held accountable to clean up and repair the damage they have caused. This clean up effort offers us a chance to transition, providing an opportunity for fossil fuel workers to be part of the solution by helping restore public lands. A federal economic stimulus program focused on plugging 500,000 abandoned and orphaned wells across the country could generate upward of 120,000 jobs for former oil and gas workers. Wyoming workers could go right to work cleaning up the thousands of abandoned wells in our state.
Merry-Go-Round - Fremont Canyon, Photo by: Ken Henke, Flickr
The opportunities for lands conservation, clean energy and restoration jobs are promising for the coming years, and we should embrace them all. Another bright light opportunity lies in President Joe Biden’s effort to create jobs centered around environmental solutions by starting a Civilian Climate Corps, inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. This bold initiative will offer well-paying, good jobs to younger Americans working on projects to conserve and restore public lands, waters, and forests -- projects that will increase carbon sequestration, protect biodiversity, improve outdoor access, and address climate change.
We cannot chain ourselves to the fossil fuel past. But unfortunately and as we’ve seen before, the oil and gas industry is launching an all-out PR campaign to scare communities into all-or-nothing thinking: either we allow excessive fossil fuel extraction on millions of acres of lands in our state, or we lose our economy and way of life. It’s not true, and it’s time we finally debunk that myth.
First and foremost, it is important to understand that reports that purport to show the “economic devastation” that might result from this oil and gas extraction freeze are funded by the oil and gas industry themselves. Just last December, the oil and gas industry group Western Energy Alliance financed the outreach campaign that warned about the economic impact from President Biden's planned freeze on oil and gas development on federal land. Lawmakers intentionally kept the industry funding quiet until journalists unearthed the information. This type of fear mongering is harmful and inaccurate, and does nothing to help us constructively face the future.
Second, under the Trump administration an oil company could purchase development rights on public land for less than $2 per acre in Wyoming. With leases so cheap, fossil fuel companies have stockpiled millions of acres of our public lands, now owning the rights to develop 6.2 million acres in Wyoming alone. More than half of leased public land in Wyoming has low potential for fossil fuels, but it remains tied up in leases that threaten other values and prevent these public lands from being managed for conservation, recreation, or other uses.
On lands where fossil fuels are being extracted, oil and gas corporations are left off-the-hook for the full cost of clean-up, thanks to outdated federal bonding rates. When companies go bankrupt and abandon their wells – which is happening with great frequency right now – taxpayers are stuck with paying the price to clean up their mess and dealing with contaminated drinking water, polluted air, and impaired wildlife habitat. This could end up costing the public hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, at a time when states already are facing the economic impact of a public health crisis. We simply can’t afford to clean up industry’s mess, nor should it be our responsibility. With worsening wildfires, more extreme heat, and deeper and longer droughts, the price tag of fossil fuels only goes up. We, as a state and country, are seriously underestimating the price we’re paying for oil and gas.
It is past time to accept the reality that we are on the tail end of the fossil fuel age. We must use this moment to invest in a just transition to clean energy and reinvest in our communities that will be most affected by the departing fossil fuel economy. For decades the U.S. government has incentivized our dependence on fossil fuels, while ignoring the fact that the boom-and-bust fossil fuel economy was always unstable. The Department of the Interior must ensure that communities across Wyoming have the necessary resources to make this change.
Right now, Wyoming has a unique opportunity to move toward something better, to invest in a future that is healthier, more prosperous and much more stable. To succeed, we need our leaders to be bold, embrace change, and do everything in their power to help our residents and our state successfully navigate to a new economic future.