Sunday, Jan. 9, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Soon, the Bureau of Land Management is scheduled to hold its first oil and gas lease sale in Nevada under the Biden administration, despite its acknowledgment that the federal oil and gas leasing program has failed Nevadans repeatedly — for decades.
The Department of the Interior — of which the BLM is a part — recently released its own report that identifies many significant shortcomings with the leasing program, and what reforms need to be made in order to fix it. Given these obvious problems and the solutions that have been identified that could be deployed right now, the BLM should defer its upcoming lease sale in Nevada, as well as all future lease sales, until Interior has fulfilled its commitment to reforming the federal government’s outdated leasing program
Wasteful speculation is one of the key shortcomings identified in the department’s report. Because anyone, even if they have no ability or plans to drill for oil or gas, is able to nominate and purchase leases on public lands. And they can do so without having to pay any sort of nomination fee and are able to squat on public lands for just a couple of dollars an acre per year. A bill led by Sens. Jackie Rosen, D-Nev., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, would change that by establishing a lease nomination fee — for the first time ever — and forcing speculators to actually pursue development or pay higher annual rents to the American public.
The vast majority of federal land in Nevada is leased through a noncompetitive process and only a tiny fraction of leases ever produce any oil and gas. That means oil and gas companies and energy speculators have been able to scoop up millions of acres of public lands — most with low potential for development — through an archaic backdoor loophole known as noncompetitive leasing. That then precludes these landscapes from being managed for other uses, such as recreation, even if they are not likely to produce any oil and gas or generate revenues for communities.
Nevada does not have significant oil reserves and produces minimal return on oil and gas activities. Our public lands should not be up for wild speculation. Our lands deserve stronger protections, and those protections must include closing the noncompetitive leasing loophole and taking steps to ensure taxpayers get a fair return on public lands that are leased.
Not one more oil and gas lease sale should be held until it is guaranteed that Nevadans are prioritized over oil and gas CEOs. It’s time for the Department of the Interior and Congress to take action and move forward with common-sense reforms that will help curb wasteful and fiscally irresponsible speculative leasing and protect taxpayers in Nevada, our economy and our public lands.
Jennie Scherbinski is a volunteer board member for the Nevada Wildlife Federation. She lives in Reno.
