DRILL BABY, DRILL
Chris D'Angelo
Wed, October 2, 2024
A back-and-forth about federal lands during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate shined light on how a future Trump administration — much like the first — would treat publicly owned acres as little more than landscapes to be exploited and developed.
Asked about the Republican Party platform’s proposal to pawn off federal lands to address housing affordability, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), effectively argued that undeveloped acres are serving little, if any, purpose.
“Well, what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that are not being used for anything,” he said. “They’re not being used for a national park … and they could be places where we build a lot of housing.”
“We have a lot of land that could be used,” he added.
To be clear, many of the landscapes Vance is talking about are being used — for hunting, fishing, recreation, habitat protection and grazing, among other things. Also, it’s important to point out that keeping natural landscapes intact provides myriad public benefits, from safeguarding clean air, water and wildlife habitat to mitigating the mounting impacts of global climate change, a threat that Trump has dismissed as a “hoax.”
Under Trump and Vance, safeguarding federal lands for what they provide naturally would be an afterthought. Their idea of “use” appears narrow and exploitative.
“What would immediately change the equation for American citizens? If you lower energy prices. As Donald Trump says, ‘Drill, baby, drill,’” Vance said Tuesday, going on to blame the Biden administration for fuel prices. “If we open up American energy, you will get immediate pricing relief for American citizens, not by the way just in housing, but in a whole host of other economic goods too.”
That argument — that boosting oil and gas production would immediately lower gas prices and inflation — is one that economists and industry experts have repeatedlychallenged. It conveniently ignores the fact that domestic gas prices are inherently tied to a global market, that oil companies have raked in record profits in recent years and that domestic oil and gas production are at record highs.
"What would immediately change the equation for American citizens? If you lower energy prices," Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said during his vice presidential debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). The Washington Post via Getty Images
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, repeatedly reminded Vance about current U.S. fossil fuel production on Tuesday. And he pushed back on Vance’s development-first vision for federal public lands.
“I worry about this, as someone who cares deeply about our national parks and our federal lands,” Walz said. “Look, Minnesota, we protect these things. We’ve got about 20% of the world’s freshwater. These lands protect, they’re there for a reason, they belong to all of us.”
Addressing Vance’s suggestion of using federal lands to solve America’s housing crunch, Walz voiced concern about viewing housing as a commodity and thinking about federal lands for their potential for financial gain.
“Are we going to drill and build houses on the same federal land?” he asked, adding there isn’t a lot of federal land around Minneapolis and other urban centers where housing is in high demand.
Walz’s position is a notable departure from that of the Biden administration and his own running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris. In July, the Biden-Harris administration unveiled a housing plan that called for “repurposing public land sustainably to enable as many as 15,000 additional affordable housing units to be built in Nevada.” And in a press release announcing several actions a Harris-Walz administration would take in its first 100 days to bring down costs for American families, Harris’ campaign said it would “take action to make certain federal lands eligible to be repurposed for new housing developments that families can afford.”
One big champion of selling off federal lands to address housing shortages is William Perry Pendley, an anti-federal land attorney who served as Trump’s acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. In late June, Pendley published an op-edin the Washington Examiner titled, “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land,” in which he grumbled about the size of the federal estate and argued Westerners “find their way to a better future impeded unnecessarily by vast swaths of federal land largely unused, unnecessary, and exorbitantly expensive to maintain.”
Pendley authored the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025, a sweeping policy blueprint that right-wing operatives compiled to guide Trump and his team should he win in November. Pendley’s vision for the federal agency is for it to effectively hand the keys to public lands across the West over to fossil fuel and other extractive industries, as HuffPost previously reported.
Public land advocates and housing experts have warned that opening public lands for housing development would do little, if anything, to address home affordability, as well as possibly open the door for construction of vacation and luxury homes that would only further exacerbate the growing housing problem.
“They realized a wholesale sell-off [of federal lands] was a political third rail, so now they’re trying to frame it as a housing solution, but what they’re actually proposing is just more sprawl and McMansions,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director at the Colorado-based conservation group Center for Western Priorities, previously told HuffPost about the Republican Party proposal.
This Feb. 9, 2005, file photo shows the suburbs of Las Vegas from atop the Stratosphere tower looking west down Sahara Ave., toward the Spring Mountains. Despite drought, cities in the U.S. West expect their populations to grow considerably in the coming decades. via Associated Press
Trump is seemingly eyeing public lands for much more than additional housing.
In a Newsweek op-ed published Tuesday detailing his plans for driving economic growth, Trump vowed to “set up special zones on federal land with ultra-low taxes and regulations for American producers, to entice the relocation of entire industries from other countries.” He also promised to slash regulations and “seriously expedite environmental approvals so we can use the resources we have right here on American soil.”
It’s not entirely clear what Trump has in mind here, but it sounds like an extension of his first-term public lands agenda that consistently prioritized drilling, mining and other exploitation over conservation.
During Tuesday’s debate, Vance slammed the Biden-Harris administration’s “regulatory regime.”
“We are a country of builders. We’re a country of doers. We’re a country of explorers,” he said. “But we increasingly have a federal administration that makes it harder to develop our resources, makes it harder to build things, and wants to throw people in jail for not doing everything exactly as Kamala Harris says they have to do. And what that means is that you have a lot of people who would love to build homes who aren’t able to build homes.”
Vance did not elaborate on the people he claimed Harris is putting in jail.
Walz prodded Vance about which regulations he wants to see scrapped.
“I think whenever we talk regulations, people think we can get rid of them. I think you want to be able to get out of your house in a fire,” Walz said.
The two vice presidential contenders also sparred on the debate stage over climate change, a threat that is both wreaking havoc on public lands across the country and being driven in no small part by fossil fuel development across the United States.
Vance condemned the Biden administration’s energy and environmental agenda, arguing that if Harris and Democrats were serious about confronting climate change, they would push for more energy production in the U.S.
“Clearly, Kamala Harris doesn’t believe her own rhetoric on this,” he said. “If she did, she would actually agree with Donald Trump’s energy policies.”
Walz reminded Vance that the Biden administration’s climate and clean energy investments have led to a boom in domestic manufacturing. And he denounced Trump for reportedly soliciting $1 billion in fossil fuel industry campaign donations in exchange for dismantling many of Biden’s green energy policies.
“To call it a ‘hoax’ and to take the oil company executives to Mar-a-Lago, say, ‘Give me money for my campaign and I’ll let you do whatever you want,’” Walz said. “We can be smarter about that, and an all-of-the-above energy policy is exactly what [Harris] is doing, creating those jobs right here.”
As much of the U.S. Southeast reels from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene, a deadly storm that researchers have already concluded was supercharged by climate change, Trump is traveling to Texas this week to solicit donations from oil and gas executives, Bloomberg reported.
Montana GOP Senate Hopeful Scrambles To Explain Public Lands Position
Chris D'Angelo
Tue, October 1, 2024
Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester and Republican challenger Tim Sheehy spent a full seven minutes of Monday night’s one-hour debate sparring over the issue of federal public lands.
Tester, who is running for a fourth term in a pivotal race that could ultimately decide which party controls the Senate next year, repeatedly painted Sheehy as a threat to America’s public lands and the Montana way of life.
He referred multiple times to HuffPost’s reporting that first revealed Sheehy called for federal lands to be “turned over” to states or counties; failed to disclose his post on the board of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Bozeman-based property rights and environmental research nonprofit with a history of advocating for privatizing federal lands; and appeared to doctor a recent TV ad to remove PERC’s logo from the shirt he was wearing.
Sheehy largely avoided engaging in the specifics of Tester’s attacks, instead continuing a muddled effort to rewrite his record on the issue and accusing Tester of trying to tear down any organization he has been affiliated with.
The extensive back-and-forth came after Montana PBS journalist John Twiggs asked the candidates which entities are best equipped to manage the approximately 27 million acres of federal lands in Montana while maintaining public access.
“Bottom line: Public lands belong in public hands,” Sheehy said.
Tester marveled at what he described as Sheehy’s “incredible transformation on this issue” while warning voters to “watch out what people say in back rooms.”
“What they say in back rooms, when they don’t think the recorder is going or the camera is running, is usually what they think,” he said. “And Tim said we need to turn our lands over to either his rich buddies or county government. That’s not protecting public lands.”
Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester speaks at a rally Sept. 5 in Bozeman, Montana. William Campbell via Getty Images
Tester was referring to comments Sheehy made to a ranching podcast last October, shortly after launching his Senate bid. As HuffPost first reported, Sheehy told the “Working Ranch Radio Show” that “local control has to be returned, whether that means, you know, some of these public lands get turned over to state agencies, or even counties, or whether those decisions are made by a local landlord instead of by, you know, federal fiat a few thousand miles away.”
While Sheehy has spent the past year doing damage control on this issue, claiming he opposes the sale or transfer of federal lands despite his own words to the contrary, his comments Monday make clear that when he says “public hands,” he means the hands of Montanans only.
“Public lands belong to the public, that’s you — the people of Montana,” Sheehy said. “Public lands belong to the people, especially those who live amongst them. And I believe that if you’re a Montanan and you share a fence line with National Forest property, if you’re a rancher who has a [Bureau of Land Management] grazing lease, if you live next to state trust land, you should have more input into what happens on that land than bureaucrats 3,000 miles away.”
Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and multimillionaire businessman, owns a sprawling ranch in Martinsdale, Montana, that, notably, shares a fence line with Forest Service land and once offered high-dollar hunting excursions with what it called “private access to over 500,000 acres of National Forest.”
Sheehy’s position — that federal agencies are poor stewards of the federal estate and that locals know best how to manage federal lands — disregards the fact that federal lands, in Montana and everywhere else, are held in trust for all Americans, regardless of where they live, not just those who happen to live next door.
“I, absolutely, will every day advocate for more local control of those lands, because I believe they belong to you, not the government,” Sheehy said.
Montana Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tim Sheehy walks up to the stage during a rally for Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump at the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse at Montana State University on Aug. 9 in Bozeman, Montana. Michael Ciaglo via Getty Images
Sheehy is walking the same fine line as many members of the GOP. Republicans in Western states have spent decades working to wrest control of federal lands from the federal government. But broad public support for protecting public lands has forced them to largely abandon calls for outright transfer and sale and instead advocate for giving states broad management authority — a move that would ultimately allow them to achieve many of the same industry-friendly goals that would come with stripping lands from federal control.
Again and again, Tester brought the conversation back to Sheehy’s record.
“Tim even served on a think tank, on their board of directors, that’s job was to privatize our public lands,” Tester said. “In Tim’s case, his view of turning these lands over to counties or opening ’em up for his rich friends to buy them, is just the wrong direction to go for Montana.”
Sheehy defended himself with a false claim about PERC: “No one, including myself, in that organization has ever advocated for selling our public lands — never have, never will.”
In fact, in a 1999 policy paper titled “How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands,” PERC’s then-director, Terry Anderson, and others laid out what they called “a blueprint for auctioning off all public lands over 20 to 40 years.” (PERC previously told HuffPost that that paper “is not representative of PERC’s current thinking.”)
“Tim, it’s time to be honest with the people of Montana,” Tester fired back. “You were on a board of an organization that wanted to privatize our public lands. In fact, you even dulled out a badge on one of your ads of a shirt that you wore that was promoting that group. When you found out that badge was on there you said, ‘Hey we can’t be doing that because these guys, I served on their board and they want to get rid of our public lands.’”
“You also didn’t even disclose to the public when you filed for this position that you belonged on that board,” Tester added. “Why? It wasn’t because they were a great organization doing great things for our public lands. It was because they wanted to get rid of our public lands and you were a part of that organization and you didn’t want anybody to know about it.”
As HuffPost first reported, Sheehy failed to include his post on PERC’s board in his Senate financial disclosure — a violation of Senate rules that Sheehy’s campaign chalked up to an “oversight.” Since its founding in 1980, PERC has called for privatizing federal lands, including national parks, and been a staunch opponent of Montana’s unique stream access laws, which provide anglers and recreationists virtually unlimited access to the state’s rivers and streams, including those that flow through private property.
Sheehy’s pro-transfer comments and ties to PERC have been a consistent thorn in the side of his campaign, which over the past year has run a damage-control effort aimed at recasting Sheehy as a champion of public lands. Sheehy’s campaign recently aired a public lands-focused TV ad that featured a current PERC board member, and last month sent out public land mailers to Montana voters that included a picture of Sheehy wearing a flannel shirt with the PERC logo clearly visible on one sleeve. More recently, Sheehy’s team doctored a TV advertisement to remove PERC’s logo from the shirt he was wearing.
At Monday’s debate, Sheehy said Tester’s attacks against PERC are part of a pattern.
“The reason that organization has been criticized by Jon Tester is simply because I was affiliated with it,” he said. “And this has been their plan this entire campaign. If Tim Sheehy is affiliated with anything, attack it, tear it down, smear it.”
If Monday’s debate shined light on anything, it’s that Sheehy has gotten an earful from Montana voters who support protecting and preserving federal public lands. But unlike Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), who credited voters with changing his mind on transferring federal lands to states when he ran against Tester in 2018, Sheehy is refusing to acknowledge the reason for having walked back, or disguised, his anti-federal land views.
Whether Sheehy’s newfound opposition to pawning off public lands would survive a six-year Senate term remains to be seen — if he manages to defeat Tester in November.
During the debate, the Montana Republican Party took to X, formerly Twitter, to defend their candidate against Tester’s repeated swings.
“@SheehyforMT will work to preserve and expand public access to your public lands and he will KEEP PUBLIC LANDS IN PUBLIC HANDS!” the party wrote.
Just three months ago, the Montana GOP — the party Sheehy is seeking a leadership role in — adopted a party platform that explicitly calls for the “granting of federally managed public lands to the state, and development of a transition plan for the timely and orderly transfer.”
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