March 7, 2024

DENVER – Western Energy Alliance’s president, Kathleen Sgamma, will testify at a hearing entitled, “Monetizing Nature and Locking up Public Land: The Implications of Biden’s Strategy for Natural Capital Accounting” before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Sgamma’s testimony focuses on the detriments of federal agencies implementing the president’s natural capital accounting strategy to assess ecological services values and the growing number of federal bureaucratic initiatives that crowd out basic government services. The hearing is scheduled for Thursday, March 7th, at 10:15 a.m. ET, and will be available on the committee’s website.

“The initiative on natural capital accounting is but another example of bureaucratic encrustation. Twenty-seven federal agencies are now busily figuring out how to account for the natural resource and ecosystem services values they control or advise on. Like other initiatives that have no basis in U.S. law, the Biden Administration looks outside the country for justification. The environmental-economic statistics are to be based on the United Nations’ System of Environmental-Economic Accounting,” said Sgamma. “As the federal government struggles to provide services at a reasonable cost to taxpayers and our national debt has swelled to nearly $35 trillion because the government cannot keep to its means, it is now to apply a whole new accounting framework for often subjective ecosystem services valuations.

Sgamma’s full testimony is available on the Alliance’s website.

What: House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
Hearing on Monetizing Nature and Locking up Public Land: The Implications of
Biden’s Strategy for Natural Capital Accounting.

Who: Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance

When: Thursday, March 7th, 10:15 a.m. ET

Where: Livestream on the committee webpage.

# # #