Trump Nominates Oiliest Fossil Fuel Lobbyist to Run the Bureau of Land Management
Jonah Gas Field, Wyoming. Photo: Erik Molvar.
Yesterday morning, the White House announced its nomination to head the nation’s largest land-management agency: Kathleen Sgamma, perhaps the most notoriously slippery lobbyist of the famously dishonest oil industry. The Bureau of Land Management oversees 700 million acres of publicly-owned, federally-managed mineral deposits in the United States beneath both public lands and private property. Today, one of the industry’s most aggressive shills is awaiting Senate confirmation to be put in charge of these extensive fossil fuel deposits.
In oil and gas industry circles, the Independent Petroleum Association of the Mountain States (IPAMs), now known as the Western Energy Alliance, has long been viewed as a radical element that consistently stakes out the most anti-environmental positions. Kathleen Sgamma’s name started showing up on IPAMS documents in 2006, when she was co-author of several reports linking oil and gas production to nitric oxide and ozone pollution associated with Clean Air Act violation in Wyoming and Colorado. By 2010, Sgamma had become IPAMS’ chief lobbyist, given the title Director of Government Affairs.
In 2009, after natural gas production caused a spike in smog in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Valley that exceeded air quality standards, Sgamma complained that proposed ozone regulations under consideration by the state “would create undue burdens and complexities for industry.” In the winter of the following year, the smog in Pinedale, Wyoming exceeded the worst air pollution in Los Angeles, and local residents were warned to stay indoors to protect their health.
When Congress responded to increasing human fatalities from toxic fracking compounds used in oil and gas well completions with a bill in 2009 to regulate fracking chemicals, Sgamma characterized fracking as having an “exemplary safety record” and said that fracking compounds were 99.5% water and sand with the rest food-grade chemicals. Definitive science later exposed major health risks, undercutting Sgamma’s claims.
Sgamma’s industry lobbying has undermined sage grouse conservation. With the sage grouse population of the Jonah Field down to just 6 strutting birds by 2015, Sgamma touted her lobby group’s report arguing that the use of directional drilling had successfully avoided, minimized, and mitigated impacts to sage grouse. Environmentalists had famously urged the use of directional drilling in the Jonah Field, but industry representatives fought back, claiming it couldn’t be done. Despite a leaked report that showed that 54 directional wells had already been drilled in the Joanh Field using directional technology with considerable success, the Bureau of Land Management instead denied the directional requirement and instead authorized up to 128 surface wellpads per square mile, making the Jonah Field the West’s most destructive oil and gas project. Later, Sgamma was an enthusiastic proponent of the first Trump administration’s gutting of the rangewide sage grouse plan amendments, an effort later blocked by the courts.
Sgamma has been as slippery as an oil slick on climate issues. In 2016, Sgamma testified before Congress that “We do not need federal rules to tell us to capture methane, because it is the very product we’re working so hard to capture and sell.” The very next year, Sgamma was one of the industry’s leading cheerleaders for a new rule allowing the oil industry to waste natural gas by releasing it directly into the atmosphere or burning it at the wellhead, without even paying federal royalties on the valuable commodity. “We’re pleased that the proposed rule delaying the BLM venting and flaring rule has been released, Sgamma said in 2017. “It doesn’t make sense to have companies comply with a rule that will be substantially changed in the near future.” In the wake of a lawsuit by a group of concerned children seeking to establish a constitutional right to a climate capable of sustaining human life, Sgamma mocked the children as having unrealistic goals, and asserted that climate change and fossil fuels were not harming young people.
If the Senate confirms Kathleen Sgamma to be put in charge of the Bureau of Land Management then we will have a land management agency headed by a Big Oil lobbyist that sees what is best for the public land as maximizing the oil industry’s footprint on those lands. “With that attachment to the land, we take public lands stewardship very seriously,” Sgamma testified before Congress in 2021. “We’re proud that oil and natural gas on federal lands is done sustainably and furthers the goals of environmental justice.” It would be laughable if it wasn’t so bonkers.
Eat your cornflakes and drink your fracking fluid, boys and girls, because drilling is good for you, and if Kathleen Sgamma is confirmed by the Senate, she’ll be ramming it down your throats.
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