One Big Beautiful Bill ‘exacerbates climate crisis’ on public lands, conservationists claim

After a proposed provision in the recent Republican tax break and spending cut law that would have opened up millions of acres of federal lands for sale was axed, Colorado climate leaders and public lands advocates still didn’t have much to celebrate. 

That’s because the massive federal policy bill‘s surviving provisions governing oil and gas leasing on federal lands are “an egregious step back for the environment,” according to Melissa Hornbein, a senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. 

The law makes it easier to lease federal lands in several Western states for oil and gas extraction. It also limits the ways by which this land can be regulated and lowers the royalty rate that oil and gas companies must pay the government, among other related provisions. 

“This bill goes in the wrong direction, essentially promoting oil and gas leasing, and then on top of that, it’s hamstringing (government) discretion to minimize the on-the-ground impacts of oil and gas infrastructure,” Hornbein said. “It’s exacerbating the climate crisis.”

The law, achieved through the reconciliation process in Congress and signed July 4 by President Donald Trump, who calls it the “big, beautiful bill,” mandates that the secretary of the Interior Department make federal lands available for oil and gas leasing on, at minimum, a quarterly basis in nine states, including Colorado. The available lands are governed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. 

Those agencies handle swaths of public lands that are typically multiuse. On Colorado’s public lands, hikers trek through forests of spruce and pine trees, families go camping and fishing and hunters search for elk in the northwest. The lands are also often used for commercial purposes, including by tourism and recreation companies, and for resource extraction. The state is home to 24 million acres of federal land.

By prioritizing oil and gas leasing above other uses for certain lands, the law “hurts everybody but the extractive industries,” said Colorado Springs resident and outdoorsman David Lien.

Lien, a longtime champion of public lands, frequently hunts in the San Juan National Forest near Durango, and he has hiked peaks across the state.

“We were able to stop the direct sell-offs (of public lands), but we probably didn’t anticipate how bad some of these other provisions would be,” Lien said. “To use a hunting term, I’d say the reconciliation bill passed by Congress has gutted public lands, in respect to extractive industries.”

The Bureau of Land Management declined an interview request for this article. 

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a historic piece of legislation that will restore energy independence and make life more affordable for American families by reversing disastrous Biden-era policies that constricted domestic energy production,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in a statement on Tuesday. “This marks a significant shift in how we manage our public lands, support energy development and work with local communities. The Department is proud to implement President Trump’s agenda and get the federal government back to working for the American people.”

Limited regulation

Federal lands used for oil and gas leasing are regulated by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management through a variety of means, including resource management plans, which are long-term land-use blueprints. 

Prior to the signing of the GOP reconciliation bill, these plans served as a starting point for regulation, not a finish line. But the law has made it so the government “may not add new restrictions outside of the conditions of approval included in the resource management plans” for oil and gas leases, according to a Bureau of Land Management statement.

Allison Henderson, the southern Rockies director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said this provision poses a “significant risk” to the environment, water supplies and vulnerable species of animals that live on public lands, because resource management plans “do not provide kind of the nitty-gritty, site-specific types of mitigation measures that are necessary.”

Resource management plans are typically updated every 10 to 20 years, and a single plan can often cover a wide region spanning hundreds of thousands of acres. Henderson said this makes the plans not adaptive or area-specific enough to be adequate as the exclusive means for environmental regulation of oil and gas leases on federal lands. 

“The RMPs are doing these broad, kind of general covers of big picture stuff,” Henderson said. “So this provision really seems to be like it’s trying to prevent anything more protective from going forward, which means that a lot will fall through the cracks.”

Lower royalty rate

Beyond its anticipated adverse effects on the climate, the law also decreases the revenue that states and the federal government bring in from leasing public lands for oil and gas extraction. 

When federal land is leased for resource extraction, oil and gas companies must pay royalties to the government. The GOP law sets the royalty rate for new onshore oil and gas leases at 12.5%, which is below market rate and significantly lower than the Biden-era royalty rate of 16.67%. This change means the government is expected to earn billions of dollars less in royalties over the next decade.

Oil and gas lease royalties in Colorado are split roughly equally between the federal government and the state. In 2024, oil and gas lease royalties for onshore federal land in Colorado totaled $131 million, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior natural resource revenue database.

“In addition to being a significant attack on public lands, this is also going to be causing us to lose billions of dollars in royalties, and then who knows what the ultimate billion dollars of cost it’ll be as a result of the climate emissions that are going to end up happening because of these leases,” Henderson said.

Editor’s note: This story first appeared on Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.