Wyoming hardest hit by incoming president’s pledge to ban development DENVER -- A ban on oil and natural gas development on public lands by President-elect Joe Biden would severely harm the economies of eight western states, according to a Wyoming Energy Authority study conducted by University of Wyoming Professor Tim Considine. Over the next four years, the human cost of fulfilling Biden’s campaign pledge would be an average of 72,818 fewer jobs annually. Lost wages would total $19.6 billion, economic activity would decline $43.8 billion, and tax revenues would drop $10.8 billion by the end of Biden’s first term in Alaska, California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. By 2040, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would decline by $670.5 billion and average annual job losses would exceed 351,000 across the West.
The following are comments from Western Energy Alliance and the Petroleum Association of Wyoming in response to the report. Western Energy Alliance and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) today achieved an important victory in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming, along with the states of Montana, North Dakota, Texas and Wyoming. Judge Scott Skavdahl’s decision vacated the 2016 waste prevention rule, an overreaching methane regulation finalized in the waning days of the Obama Administration that unlawfully granted air quality authority to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
When the rule was originally finalized in November 2016 at the end of President Barack Obama’s administration, the Alliance and IPAA along with the states challenged it in the Wyoming court. The Trump Administration finalized a new rule in 2018 that corrected the unlawful aspects of the original. When environmental groups, California and New Mexico obtained a court ruling overturning the 2018 rule from the Northern District of California, our case in Wyoming was restarted. Today’s ruling by Judge Scott Skavdahl ends the seesawing litigation between the two courts. DENVER – Western Energy Alliance’s president, Kathleen Sgamma, will testify at a hearing titled Interior’s Royalty Cuts: Thoughtful Policy or Industry Giveaway? before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources. Sgamma will explain how the temporary royalty relief granted in response to the global pandemic by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is a small reduction that helps ensure royalty revenue generation far into the future. The virtual hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, October 6th, at 2:00 p.m. ET, and will be available to view on the committee’s website.
DENVER -- Western Energy Alliance welcomes the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) release of a final methane rule, the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) OOOOa rule. The following is a statement from Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma:
“Western Energy Alliance is pleased that EPA has finalized the methane rule. The rule is a sensible combination of technical fixes to the 2016 rule, as well as a correction to the violations of the Clean Air Act present in the original rule. Throughout this process, environmental groups and the media have misrepresented the rule changes as the Trump Administration rolling back any regulation of methane. This is a willfully false narrative that luckily, Administrator Wheeler had the courage to stand against. I use the word ‘courage’ intentionally as the outright lies about this rule by the environmental lobby are calculated as a way of achieving political goals without doing the hard work of following the law. Most Administrators have withered under that pressure, or were part of such efforts themselves.
DENVER – Western Energy Alliance applauds the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act with strong bipartisan support in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation takes $6.65 billion over five years in royalty revenue from oil and natural gas production on public lands and directs it towards reducing the National Park Service’s $12 billion maintenance backlog. “You’re welcome! Oil and natural gas production on non-park, non-wilderness public lands will now help meet the mounting needs of our national parks,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Alliance. “Offshore production has been funding 100 percent of the Land and Water Conservation Fund for many years, and now onshore public lands development will likewise contribute directly to conservation. We’re pleased to see that a bipartisan majority in Congress recognizes that we can responsibly produce oil and natural gas on public lands while protecting the environment. |
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