Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) held nothing back Tuesday morning in condemning the Interior Department’s recently announced moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands. “You’re destroying my state’s economy, and I’m not exaggerating,” Lummis told Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at a House Natural Resources Committee budget hearing for the department.
The Interior Department announced in mid-January it would issue no new coal leases on federal lands while completing a programmatic environmental impact statement of the U.S. coal leasing program. The review is intended to determine if the program is properly structured to provide a fair return to taxpayers, reflects its impacts on the environment, and will continue to help meet the nation’s energy needs. The agency last conducted a PEIS for the federal coal program in 1983-1984. That review process also included a pause on coal leasing, as did the previous four. Currently, approximately 41 percent of the nation’s annual coal production comes from federal land.
As Lummis pointed out, roughly half of the Wyoming’s land is federally owned. The state is also the nation’s largest supplier of coal.
Increasing the royalties mining companies pay for federal coal leases would negatively affect Wyoming, where the economy is already struggling, Lummis said. “Coal companies are going bankrupt, railroad workers are being laid off, coal miners are being laid off, there are coal miners jobs declining every month in 2015,” Lummis said.
The lawmaker also questioned the logic behind halting leasing while trying to decide if the federal coal leasing program offers a fair return to taxpayers. “No leasing means no financial return,” she said.
Jewell defended the moratorium by suggesting the coal industry is in decline, not because of federal policies, but because of an ongoing shift to natural gas for electricity generation due to market-based factors. “There’s no question that coal has been an important part of our energy past and will continue to be an important part of our energy future, but the prices for coal and how it interplays with natural gas and other sources of energy are based on worldwide commodity prices,” Jewell said, suggesting that the moratorium is being used as a scapegoat for the decline in the coal industry.
The two disagreed not only on the cause of the decline in the coal industry but also on the effectiveness of the Interior Department’s actions to try to keep the industry afloat during the moratorium. The pause on leasing will not affect current leases, Jewell said. “There is a 20-year supply of coal under lease currently on public lands right now,” she explained.
Lummis, however, was not impressed by the exclusion for current leases. “That pause does not allow companies to plan, and there is no limit on how long these programmatic EISs are going to take,” she fired back at Jewell.
Jewell got some support from the other side of the aisle as Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) applauded the measure. “I want to thank you for pushing the pause button on federal coal leasing while you take a long overdue review, a long-needed review of the program,” Lowenthal said, also noting that such moratoriums have taken place under the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Lowenthal went so far as to suggest that the coal industry has been coddled. “I think we have unfairly … been subsidizing coal production … and letting coal be produced or mined at rock bottom prices, so I’m glad you’re taking another look at how we lease coal, and that we don’t give it away too cheaply,” he said.
