Among President Donald Trump’s signature initiatives was pursuing “American energy dominance” through a series of regulatory rollbacks to fast-track fossil fuel development, regardless of the potential impacts on the global climate.
But that strategy may actually be slowing development on Utah’s and other Western states’ public lands because the Bureau of Land Management has been forced to reanalyze many of the oil and gas leases it sold in recent years.
For the fourth time in the past year, the BLM’s Utah office last month pulled back dozens of leases covering thousands of acres after acknowledging that its environmental analysis was inadequate in light of a successful court challenge to leases in another state, according to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.