“You have to take it back to DC and rebuild it,” said Joel Clement, a former climate change policy expert who resigned from the agency in protest of the Trump administration’s policy. “The staff, the budget – all these people who had to work with Congress on this policy were driven out of the West, or they left,” he said. “They have been greatly demoralized.”
It is expected that Ms. Haaland will also revisit the Trump administration’s return of habitat protection under the Endangered Species Act. Under the Trump rules, it has become easier to remove a species from the endangered list, and for the first time, regulators have been allowed to conduct economic assessments – for example, to estimate the lost income from a ban on reporting in a critical habitat – when deciding whether a species justifies protection.
Such rules led to an exodus of staff, especially from the Fish and Wildlife Service, Mr Clement said.
“There needs to be a rebuilding,” he said.
The Department of the Interior must also submit a detailed new plan by June 2022 setting out how the federal government will manage the outer outer continental shelf off the U.S. coastline, an area rich in marine desert and oil and gas resources under the sea. .
Given the commitment of mr. Praying to ban new drilling, the new foreign governance plan will most likely reinstate Obama-era policies banning oil exploration across the entire East and West Coasts of the United States – while possibly going further, through drilling to the coast. of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. But it is difficult to write the legal, economic and scientific justification.
“They need to start and really get cracked,” said Jacqueline Savitz, vice president of Oceana, an environmental group.
As the department moves against foreign drilling, it is expected that it will help sharpen wind farms abroad. Last week, the agency took an important step toward approving the country’s first large-scale overseas wind farm, near Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., A project that has been going on for years.