Washington • The Trump administration will calculate the climate effects of its oil, gas and coal leasing decisions, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in an interview Wednesday, but will not make those impacts the key factor in its final decisions.
Bernhardt, who took office a month ago, said he was committed to carrying out President Donald Trump’s plans to expand fossil-fuel production on public lands. In March, a federal judge ruled that the federal government illegally approved two gas drilling plans in western Colorado; on Monday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that Interior’s Bureau of Land Management failed to account for the effect of fracking as many as 4,000 oil and gas wells in New Mexico’s Greater Chaco region.