Zinke’s Year of Pushing His Pro-Polluter Agenda

Washington, DC -- One year ago, Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at exploiting our public lands for fossil fuel development and rolling back Obama-era safeguards. Included in this order was a directive to the Department of the Interior to review existing policies and remove any safeguard that might slow down corporate polluters seeking to drill, mine, or frack in America’s public lands and waters.

In the year since, Ryan Zinke has made it his mission to be a “partner” with industry while pushing their agenda, ignoring the cost to America’s health, safety, and wild places.

“Ryan Zinke has spent the last year advocating for industry’s agenda and bending over backwards to give away America’s lands and waters to corporate polluters,” said Lena Moffitt, Senior Director of the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign. “This polluter-friendly approach to managing our cherished public spaces is completely backward and dangerous.”

• Zinke has led the largest rollback of protections for public lands in America’s history. Zinke called for the elimination of protections for Bears Ears National Monument and cutting Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument almost in half. While he at first halfheartedly covered up the basis for his actions, they were designed to cater to the oil, gas, and uranium industries. Zinke also paved the way for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the world’s last untouched wild places. These areas, along with millions more acres of our public lands in the West and the Arctic, have been put up for auction for the fossil fuel industry to mine, frack, and drill.

• Zinke has launched an all-out attack on our oceans. In January, he released a reckless draft offshore drilling plan that would usher in the largest expansion of offshore drilling ever, expanding drilling into nearly every corner of America’s waters, including  the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Arctic. The plan has been met with lukewarm interest from industry and bipartisan opposition from the public, which has only been strengthened by Zinke’s inept political gamesmanship and mishandling of the plan from the start.

• Not only is Zinke offering up our public lands and waters to the fossil fuel industry, but he has also spent the last year attempting to roll back commonsense safeguards designed to protect public health, worker safety, and the environment. Over the last year, Zinke has delayed or gutted rules requiring companies that frack on public lands to disclose what chemicals they’re using and limiting leakage of methane emissions (a greenhouse gas 87 times more potent than carbon dioxide during the time it remains in the atmosphere) from oil and gas operations on public lands. He’s also worked to make offshore drilling even more dangerous by rolling back safety standards put in place after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Thanks to Zinke, not only are more of our public lands and waters open to extractive industries, but they’re also being allowed to operate largely unchecked, emitting as much pollution as they like, regardless of the effect on our lands, public health, and climate.

• Zinke has reshaped Interior’s advisory boards to represent industry’s interests. He recently changed the charters of the Bureau of Land Management’s resource advisory councils to focus on rolling back regulations and promoting oil and gas development. Zinke also filled the Royalty Policy Committee with representatives from the oil and gas industry, packed a committee on public lands management with those who stand to gain private profit from public lands, and filled a wildlife committee with trophy hunters.