Deadline is Thursday, August 15th.
Our climate is at a tipping point and our public lands are in the crosshairs. Every decision we make on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is critical in determining whether we go down the road of a livable climate, or an irreversible and devastating heating of our planet. And the fossil fuel industry wants us to sacrifice our public lands so it can mine and drill wherever it wants.
MEIC has been very aggressive in taking on these challenges. Last year we beat Donald Trump’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in court over resource management plans (RMP) for Eastern Montana. They ignored the massive impact mining and extracting fossil fuels have on the climate. RMPs are intended to be plans to guide future management of public lands. Instead BLM wants to make the RMP a guide for the fossil fuel industry to dig billions of tons of coal and drill thousands of wells in eastern Montana.
A federal court told BLM to go back to the drawing board and develop a new RMP that actually considers the massive impacts to our climate from continuing to permit unmitigated fossil fuel extraction on our public lands.
The BLM completely failed.
The BLM has issued two new RMPs that again ignore the impact on climate. We’re talking about billions of tons of coal, millions of barrels of oil, and billions of cubic feet of gas. It’s not rocket science — these dirty fuels will have disastrous effects on our climate and on our future.
We can’t let the Trump Administration recklessly kowtow to fossil fuel corporations at the expense of present and future generations.
We need to stand together and tell the Trump Administration to protect our public lands and keep our climate safe. We simply don’t have a choice. By pressuring BLM now, we’re sending a clear message that the public won’t back down and that we’re ready to fight any new land-leasing proposals that jeopardize our climate and our public lands.
These millions of acres belong to all of us — current and future generations that cherish wild places, open skies, and pristine air — and we have a say in what happens to them.
