Democrats urged the Interior Department Friday to reverse four decades of easy lease approvals for coal in favor of clean energy and climate change goals.
“The fact that 90 percent of federal lease sales since 1990 had single bidders suggests that Western coal markets are structurally non-competitive,” reads a letter sent by 14 Senate Democrats to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell on Friday.
“Too often the government has been a passive auctioneer, rather than a steward,” the letter reads. “Given the diverse sources of electricity generation available today and the high costs of climate change, the current policy is unwise and outdated.”
The letter was led by Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the top Democrats on the energy and environment committees, respectively.
Jewell enacted a moratorium on new coal leases earlier this year, as the Interior Department re-evaluates how it treats coal under the federal leasing program in light of the social costs of mining and its environmental impacts.
The senators say they want the agency to get the science right, given coal’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, blamed by scientists for raising the temperature of the Earth. They also want the agency to address the “huge disparity” between the high cost of burning coal and the “low, short-term return from selling it.”
The senators point out that the effects of mining a ton of the public’s coal may rebound for centuries and damage other opportunities to use the land for recreation, water supply management and wildfire resilience, as well as for grazing cattle and harvesting timber.
The senators want Jewell to get the leasing policy right, giving it “teeth.” They say previous policies have encouraged the government to make obtaining mining leases an easy process due to the energy shortages of the 1970s.
“Given the diverse sources of electricity generation available today and the high costs of climate change, what may have been a wise policy in the context of fuel shortages and disruptions in the 1970s is now unwise and outdated,” they write.
In the 1970s, most U.S. power plants were fueled by petroleum. The Arab oil embargo placed electricity supplies in jeopardy, forcing the government to push the industry toward greater coal use. Some power producers from that era, perplexed by the current direction of the administration, readily point out the irony.
