On January 7, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Arizona), the new chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, sent a pointed letter to David Bernhardt, the acting secretary of the Department of the Interior. Grijalva wanted to know why the department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was moving ahead with public meetings on plans for oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge despite a partial government shutdown that had furloughed thousands of Interior employees and halted other operations. The meetings should be delayed, he wrote; holding them during a shutdown “gives the strong impression that BLM is simply trying to check the boxes and end the comment periods as soon as possible.”

Two days later, BLM announced it would postpone the meetings. Huh. This was something new.

It’s not clear if Grijalva’s note drove BLM’s decision, but getting his way was a welcome change for the nine-term congressman from Arizona. Grijalva says he sent Interior dozens of unanswered letters seeking explanations for the department’s policies under Ryan Zinke, the former secretary who became the target of multiple ethics probes and resigned in December.

Grijalva, the committee’s ranking Democrat since 2014, has watched in frustration as the Trump administration barrels ahead toward its stated goal of energy dominance. In December, for example, BLM issued plans that would lift restrictions on oil and gas development in some nine million acres of Greater Sage-Grouse habitat on federal lands that had been protected under a 2015 compromise to keep the birds from being listed under the Endangered Species Act. Interior is also moving quickly to facilitate drilling in the Arctic Refuge and expand energy development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, along with taking a decidedly industry-friendly approach to enforcing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA).

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Source: Audubon – Jan 16, 2019
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