by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
My friend Amos Eno, one of the country’s leading conservation experts, spent a decade running the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and more recently the Land Conservation Assistance Network. His writing appears in all the right publications, and he is a popular speaker at conferences everywhere. Writing about the old/new president’s endorsement of the almost-cliché adage, “Drill, baby, drill,” he added another related but separate concept: “Shovel, baby, shovel.”
It is an apt way to describes what he calls an urgent need “to resurrect our mining of strategic and critical minerals and coal, throwing off the wet blanket of climate suffocation policies.”
There is considerable attention and debate about President Trump’s insistence on domestic oil and gas production and “American energy dominance.” Indeed, at least four first-day executive orders were about re-starting domestic energy production, especially one titled, “Unleashing American energy.” It includes directives revoking the electric vehicle mandate, freezing unspent green new deal funds, expediting liquid natural gas export facilities, and especially streamlining the permit process for oil and gas leasing, exploration, development, production, pipelines and other facilities.
That executive order also includes a less-reported provision called Section 9, related not to oil and gas drilling, but to mining. It instructs federal agencies to identify all regulations, policies and orders “that impose undue burdens on the domestic mining and processing of non-fuel minerals and undertake steps to revise or rescind such actions.” It even suggests that the government’s list of “critical minerals” needed for national defense might be amended to include uranium, perhaps foreshadowing a new plan to jump-start the nuclear power industry.
