Regulators responding to the leak couldn’t find an owner to fix it. J.D. Carty Resources LLC had drilled the well near the Rowes’ home in 2006 – promising the family a 12.5% royalty and free natural gas, which they never got. But Carty went bust in 2008 and sold the site to a company that was later acquired by Blue Energy LLC. Lawyers for both companies deny any responsibility for the leak.

A year later, Kentucky’s Division of Oil and Gas declared the well an environmental emergency and hired Boots & Coots Inc – the Texas contractor that doused oil-well fires after the Gulf War – to plug it. During the 40-day operation, the Rowes retreated to a trailer on their property and lived with no running water to escape the gases and noise. Regulators determined the leak was a toxic blend of hydrogen sulfide, a common drilling byproduct, and the potent greenhouse gas methane. 

“I wouldn’t go through this again for $1 million,” said Hanson Rowe, who with his wife is suing the energy companies for compensation. 

The incident, while extreme, reflects a growing global problem: More than a century of oil and gas drilling has left behind millions of abandoned wells, many of which are leaching pollutants into the air and water. And drilling companies are likely to abandon many more wells due to bankruptcies, as oil prices struggle to recover from historic lows after the coronavirus pandemic crushed global fuel demand, according to bankruptcy lawyers, industry analysts and state regulators.

Leaks from abandoned wells have long been recognized as an environmental problem, a health hazard and a public nuisance. They have been linked to dozens of instances of groundwater contamination by research commissioned by the Groundwater Protection Council, whose members include state ground water agencies. Orphaned wells have been blamed for a slew of public safety incidents over the years, including a methane blowout at the construction site of a waterfront hotel in California last year.

They also pose a serious threat to the climate that researchers and world governments are only starting to understand, according to a Reuters review of government data and interviews with scientists, regulators, and United Nations officials. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year recommended that U.N. member countries start tracking and publishing the amount of methane leaching from their abandoned oil and gas wells after scientists started flagging it as a global warming risk. So far, the United States and Canada are the only nations to do so.

The U.S. figures are sobering: More than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281 kilotons of methane in 2018, according to the data, which was included in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent report on April 14 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That’s the climate-damage equivalent of burning 16.2 million barrels of crude oil, according to an EPA calculation. That’s more than the United States, the world’s biggest oil consumer, uses in two days. (For a graphic on the rise in abandoned oil wells, click here )

The actual amount could be as much as three times higher, the EPA says, because of incomplete data. The agency believes most of the methane comes from the more than 2 million abandoned wells it estimates were never properly plugged.

The problem is less severe in Canada, where the bulk of oil production comes from oil sands mining instead of traditional drilling. The government estimated that its 313,000 abandoned wells emitted 10.1 kt of methane in 2018, far less than in the United States.

The global impact is harder to measure. The governments of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China – which round out the top five world oil-and-gas producers – did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on their abandoned wells and have not published reports on the wells’ methane leakage.

Researchers say it’s impossible to accurately estimate global emissions from leaky abandoned wells without better data. But a rough Reuters calculation, based on the U.S. share of global crude oil and natural gas production, would place the number of abandoned wells around the world at more than 29 million, with emissions of 2.5 million tonnes of methane per year – the climate-damage equivalent of three weeks of U.S. oil consumption.

HIDDEN MENACE

In a forested area of western New York state in February, a group of state regulators, along with researchers from the State University of New York at Binghamton, trudged through the snow. They stopped at a rotting wooden structure encircling a rusted pipe.

Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) official Charlie Dietrich held a bright orange device over the heap. It emitted a high-pitched signal, and its screen showed a code indicating the presence of ignitable gas. A scent of petroleum wafted through the air.

“There’s some methane coming up out of there,” DEC Mineral Resources Specialist Nathan Graber said.

The abandoned well lies in the forests of Olean, New York, which was an oil boomtown at the turn of the 20th century. The site was one of 72 locations logged by geophysicists Tim de Smet and Alex Nikulin in December, researchers from Binghamton, using a drone equipped with a metal detector, part of a program launched in 2013 to help New York identify and plug abandoned wells.

New York’s DEC has records of 2,200 abandoned wells dating back to the late 1800s. But the state believes the actual number could be much higher, because of incomplete records.

“It’s a lot easier to find stuff when you know where to look,” Nikulin said.

The group is among an array of regulators, activists and federal agencies now seeking out abandoned wells from the U.S. Northeast to California. The heightened interest in the climate threat posed by the wells started with a 2014 study by Princeton graduate student Mary Kang, who was the first to measure methane emissions from old drilling sites in Pennsylvania. She concluded in 2016 that abandoned wells represent 5% to 8% of total human-caused methane emissions in the state.

“It’s not like they leak for one year, and then they stop,” said Kang, now a professor of civil engineering at McGill University in Montreal. “Some of these have been there maybe for 100 years. And they are going to be there for another 100 years.”

Although the Trump administration has downplayed global warming and its link to fossil fuels, the U.S. Energy Department has been financing efforts to improve data on emissions from abandoned wells. Researchers from DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) recently took measurements from more than 200 wells in Kentucky and Oklahoma and are planning field work in Texas. They plan to publish their data by next spring.

NETL researcher Natalie Pekney said the work was crucial to better understanding the climate impact of abandoned wells. Many wells don’t leak much or at all, she said, while others have “huge” methane emissions.

NETL had previously used aerial surveys to locate old wells in Pennsylvania – home to the massive Marcellus gas deposit – so drillers could avoid pushing fluids and gases up through old abandoned well sites deep in the state’s forests. Its researchers found many old wells contained bubbling fluids, an indicator of methane leaks.

GROWING PROBLEM

Nationwide, the number of documented abandoned wells has jumped by more than 12% since 2008, around the start of the hydraulic fracturing boom, according to the EPA estimates.

Many experts believe the number will keep growing. Oil-and-gas firm bankruptcies in the United States and Canada rose 50% to 42 in 2019, and analysts say the rate is likely to accelerate as the pandemic-related slide in energy prices shakes out producers.

Research firm Rystad Energy estimates that about 73 U.S. drilling companies could go bankrupt this year, with an additional 170 succumbing in 2021, assuming an average oil price of $30 a barrel.

“When prices are this low, it becomes a very serious problem. It becomes a fight over who is going to ultimately have to pay” for cleaning up abandoned wells, said John Penn, a bankruptcy attorney with Perkins Coie LLP in Dallas. “It makes it really bad, and it’s going to get worse.”

A school district in Beverly Hills, California, was saddled with a bill of at least $11 million to plug 19 oil wells on the property of its high school, after a judge in 2017 absolved Venoco LLC – the bankrupt company that had been operating the wells – of any responsibility for clean-up because other creditors took priority. The city of Beverly Hills is contributing another $11 million to the job.

“This is an incredible amount of money” siphoned away from education, said Michael Bregy, superintendent of the Beverly Hills Unified School District.

State and federal regulations normally require drillers to pay an up-front bond to cover future cleanups if they go belly-up. But the rules are a patchwork, with wildly differing requirements, and they seldom leave governments adequately funded. In Pennsylvania, for example, it would take several thousand years to plug its estimated backlog of 200,000 abandoned oil wells at the current rate of spending, according to data from the state regulator.

Oil-industry lobbyists have been fighting state and federal efforts to increase the bonding, arguing it would hurt jobs and economic growth during an already tough time for the industry.

“States and the federal government have many sources of funding available to reclaim and plug abandoned wells,” said Reid Porter, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil and gas trade group.

The API spent $1.44 million in the first quarter of 2020 lobbying on Capitol Hill, with oil well bonding legislation one of the target issues, lobbying disclosures show.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that cleaning up and plugging an abandoned well runs from $20,000 to $145,000, putting the price tag for cleaning up all of America’s abandoned wells somewhere between $60 billion to $435 billion.

‘SHOOTING OUT OF THE EARTH’

The pollution threat goes beyond climate change. Leaks from abandoned wells have been found to contaminate groundwater and soil. In extreme cases, gas from abandoned wells has caused explosions.

In Ohio and Texas, state regulators have each found an average of around two groundwater contamination incidents per year related to orphaned wells, according to research by the Groundwater Protection Council published in 2011 and dating to the 1980s.

In April 2017, for example, neighbors of Ohio farmer Stan Brenneman alerted him to the smell of oil coming from a drainage ditch on his 111-acre corn and soybean farm near the town of Elida, Brenneman told Reuters. The ditch drains water from the farm and carries it into rivers, streams and eventually Lake Erie.

Ohio’s Division of Oil & Gas Resources Management excavated 800 feet of the farm’s drainage system to find a well casing – about 130 years old – releasing oil three feet underground. The plugging operation took two months to complete and cost the state $196,915, according to a spokeswoman for the state Department of Natural Resources.

More recently, in 2018, the U.S. EPA was alerted to the presence of nearly 50 abandoned oil and gas wells on Navajo Nation lands within the borders of Utah and New Mexico that were bubbling water at the surface. Tests showed the way from some of the wells contained potentially dangerous levels of arsenic, sulfate, benzene and chloride.

The Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency said plugging the wells would require “major funds” and that, in the meantime, the public had been warned not to drink the water.

In rare cases, gas from long-abandoned wells can cause dangerous accidents.

In January of last year, a 1930s-era well sent a geyser of gas and dirt 100 feet into the air at the construction site of a Marriott seaside hotel in Marina del Rey, California, an upscale community in the Los Angeles area, according to a state report. The hotel owners did not respond to a request for comment.

“It was horrifying,” said resident Marilyn Wall, who witnessed the explosion from her home across the street. She said she was stunned “by the extent and the length of time that the stuff was shooting out of the earth.”

A worker standing on a construction platform above the plume was sprayed with debris and scrambled to lower himself down with an escape rope, a video of the explosion shows.

DON’T DRINK THE WATER

For Hanson and Michael Rowe, their troubles did not end the day their abandoned well was plugged. They no longer drink from the water well on their property because it gives them diarrhea, they said. Michael Rowe said she still suffers from headaches and coughing spells.

Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet is still fighting to recoup the $383,340 cost from the now-defunct J.D. Carty and Blue Energy in an ongoing court battle.

An attorney for John Carty, founder of J.D. Carty, said his client had sold what few assets remained in the company and therefore bore no responsibility. A lawyer for Blue Energy said the company denies ever operating the wells on the property and has no responsibility to maintain or plug them.

J.D. Carty was only required to have one $50,000 “blanket bond” to cover all its wells in Kentucky. The amount forfeited to pay for the leaky well on Rowe’s land, determined in part by its depth, was just $2,500 – less than 1% of the cost to fix it.

After the incident, Kentucky lawmakers passed a bill last year that effectively doubled bond requirements for shallow wells to help cope with the state’s 13,000 abandoned wells. Still, state regulators say the list of wells is growing.

Hanson Rowe said he supports fossil fuel development because using natural gas for heat and cooking has improved his quality of life. But the couple say they hope their lawsuit against the companies involved will help change the way the energy industry manages its wells.

“You lost your health, you’ve lost it all,” Hanson Rowe said.

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(Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Wednesday passed a major conservation bill that would permanently direct $900 million a year to a long-standing federal program aimed at acquiring and protecting public lands.

The 73-25 vote in the Republican-led chamber was a rare bipartisan effort led by Republican Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana, as well as Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Both Gardner and Daines are up for re-election this year.

The Great American Outdoors Act, if enacted into law, would insulate the Land and Water Conservation Fund from the congressional appropriations process. It guarantees $900 million in annual funding that comes from royalties paid by offshore oil and gas drilling operations.

The LWCF was created in 1964, but Congress in most years has diverted funding for it to other uses. It received $495 million in funding last year.

The Great American Outdoors Act provides $9.5 billion over five years for deferred maintenance projects on public lands including national parks and forests.

The legislation now moves to the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass. President Donald Trump has said he would sign the bill into law.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Euro zone banks are heavily exposed to carbon-intensive industries and face significant climate-change related risks so they must start to build capacity now to manage these, European Central Bank supervisor Andrea Enria said on Wednesday.

Wanting banks to take greater responsibility for their lending, the ECB has asked banks to start publicly disclosing data on their climate-related and environmental risks and told them to include these factors in longer-term business strategy.

“An abrupt transition to a low-carbon economy would have a severe impact on climate-sensitive economic sectors, triggering an increase in banking system losses of up to 60% compared with a baseline scenario,” Enria said in a speech.

“On average, 15% of significant institutions’ exposures are to the most carbon-intensive firms, Enria added, referring to Europe’s biggest banks, which are directly supervised by the ECB.

The problem is that climate risk tends to materialize over the long term while banks typically look at risks over the coming year and regulatory requirements reinforce this short-sighted approach, Enria added.

Although the ECB has said fighting climate change is “mission critical”, the bank has faced criticism over its corporate bond purchases which include billions of euros of debt of the most polluting firms.

But the bank said excluding firms from bond buys based on their activity is beyond the realm of monetary policy and would thus exceed its mandate.

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The guilty plea, part of an agreement with prosecutors in Butte County, is intended to end all criminal proceedings against PG&E from the Camp Fire, which broke out on Nov. 8, 2018, and destroyed much of the town of Paradise.

Bill Johnson, the company’s chief executive officer, entered the plea during a hearing in Butte County Superior Court.

“I am here today on behalf of the 23,000 men and women of PG&E, to accept responsibility for the fire here that took so many lives and changed these communities forever,” Johnson said in a written statement.

The Camp Fire killed at least 84 people and destroyed some 18,000 buildings. It is considered the most destructive wildfire in California history.

PG&E’s plea deal was reached in March, ending a major roadblock for the utility to emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It came after the utility accepted tighter oversight and pledged billions of dollars to improve safety and help wildfire victims under an agreement with California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Under the agreement, PG&E would pay a maximum $3.5 million fine plus $500,000 in costs, and up to $15 million to provide water to residents after the fire destroyed the utility’s Miocene Canal.

Some fire victims are expected to receive payouts under PG&E’s bankruptcy reorganization plan.

PG&E and its utility unit filed for bankruptcy in January 2019, citing more than $30 billion in potential liabilities from California wildfires in 2017 and 2018 linked to its equipment.

The company previously reached $25.5 billion of settlements related to wildfires in 2015, 2017 and 2018, including $13.5 billion for victims and $12 billion for insurers, cities, counties and other public entities.

Under the settlement with Newsom, PG&E agreed to pay no shareholder dividends for three years, saving about $4 billion, and pursue a “rate-neutral” $7.5 billion financing package that would benefit rate payers.

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The European Commission has pledged to use its proposed 750 billion euro recovery fund to support clean hydrogen – a fuel that can be produced using renewable power and which can replace fossil fuels in polluting industrial processes.

The energy ministers of Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg on Monday said this funding must be backed by legislation.

In a joint declaration, they called on the Commission to “present a timely action plan followed by legislative proposals to enable a flexible, fit-for-purpose regulatory approach and to stimulate a liquid market for hydrogen in the coming years.”

EU energy ministers are meeting on Monday to discuss the Commission’s recovery fund proposal, which member states will debate on Friday.

The countries called for EU hydrogen production targets for 2030 and a labeling system to incentivize use of “clean” versions of the fuel.

The EU consumes around 8 million tonnes of hydrogen each year, most of which is produced from fossil gas, rather than renewable power.

“In sectors like industry and transport, it is the missing link in the energy transition. To make this happen we need to scale up and reduce the cost of clean hydrogen,” Dutch economy and energy minister Eric Wiebes said.

The Commission should also assess how EU gas infrastructure can be repurposed to carry hydrogen, including through reforms to the bloc’s energy infrastructure legislation, the countries said.

The Commission plans to publish an EU hydrogen plan later this month.

Germany and the Netherlands have already announced national strategies. Germany last week pledged 9 billion euros from its coronavirus economic recovery package to scale up production of clean hydrogen fuel.

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union looks set to slightly beat its goal to get a third of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, but public support will be needed to offset a drop in clean power investment due to COVID-19, the bloc’s top energy official said.

EU countries’ latest energy policy plans would see the bloc reach a 33% share of renewable energy by 2030, surpassing its target by one percentage point, EU energy chief Kadri Simson told an online news conference on Monday.

Renewable sources including wind, solar, hydropower and bioenergy made up just under 19% of final EU energy consumption in 2018.

Previous versions of countries’ energy policy plans had suggested the bloc would miss its 2030 renewables target by up to three percentage points.

Simson said the Commission would push tens of billions of euros into clean energy projects from its proposed 750 billion euro EU coronavirus recovery fund, to ensure the economic crisis caused by the pandemic does not thwart its green goals.

“In the context of the crisis and the fall of renewable energy investments, we must make sure that progress in this area continues,” Simson said.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global growth in new renewable energy capacity to slow for the first time in two decades this year, as the pandemic causes financing challenges and delays construction of projects.

It says renewable power additions should rebound next year to the level reached in 2019, but this will depend on continued support from governments.

Countries may have to revise their policy plans further as the Commission is considering setting tougher renewable energy targets next year, as it strives to reduce net EU greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

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Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer products company whose brands include Dove soap and Knorr soup, said it was responding to the “scale and urgency” of the climate change crisis.

The fund will invest in projects including reforestation, water preservation and carbon sequestration over the next ten years, it said.

The net zero emission target is an extension of efforts already underway to cut emissions within the company by 2030 – such as reducing electricity consumption within offices.

Unilever’s total greenhouse gas footprint was around 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019 according to its website.

“We are now going much wider in our commitments, we call it a cradle to shelf commitment…across the value chain,” Unilever Chief Supply Chain Officer, Marc Engel said.

Unilever, which has an annual turnover of 52 billion euros ($58.5 billion), said it would prioritise partnerships with suppliers who have set emission reduction targets and has set up a system where suppliers must declare the carbon footprint of goods and services provided. All packaging from 2039 will show the carbon footprint of the product, the company said.

Unilever joins a handful of companies in promising net zero emissions from their supply chain.

Kit-Kat maker Nestle (NESN.S) and German elevator maker Thyssenkrupp AG (TKAG.DE) are others though their targets are set for 2050, which is the deadline set by the Paris Agreement on climate change to limit global warming to 1.5° degrees.

Unilever on Monday also said that it aims to make all product formulations biodegradable and achieve a deforestation-free supply chain by 2023, among a raft of other moves to fight climate change.

The company said it will use satellite monitoring, geolocation tracking and blockchain among other digital technologies to increase traceability and transparency within its supply chain.

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ISTANBUL (Reuters) – An earthquake with a 5.7 magnitude shook Bingol province in eastern Turkey on Sunday, causing the collapse of a military observation tower which injured three people, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Directorate (AFAD) said the epicentre of the quake was in the Karliova district of Bingol.

Soylu said on Twitter that one security guard was trapped under the rubble of the observation tower in Karliova, while two other people were slightly hurt.

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International oil firms left Canada in droves in recent years due to the high costs to turn a profit in the sector. Some investors and banks, meanwhile, halted financing in part to pressure the world’s fourth-largest crude producer to reduce the environmental impact of oil-sands production.

This year, top producers Suncor Energy (SU.TO), Canadian Natural Resources (CNQ.TO) and Cenovus Energy (CVE.TO) have cut a combined C$1.8 billion ($1.32 billion) in planned spending on green initiatives as losses mount due to economic lockdowns that have hammered oil demand.

“This has strengthened our view on the matter, that our decision that we took (to block oil sands) was correct,” said Jeanett Bergan, KLP’s head of responsible investments.

KLP, Norway’s largest pension fund, exited oil sands investments last year, while the country’s $1 trillion wealth fund in May blacklisted Suncor and other large producers for producing excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

The Canadian industry has the highest upstream emissions intensity among major world oil and gas producers, at 39 kilograms per barrel of oil equivalent, more than triple that of the United States, consultancy Rystad Energy said in May.

The picture in Canada contrasts with Europe, where the biggest oil and gas companies have diverted a larger share of their cash to green energy, even through the outbreak.

The oil sands industry is more carbon-intensive than other forms of crude production, and faces more intense pressure from investors to limit emissions. Canadian oil producers will have a harder time convincing investors and environmentalists of their role in a future lower carbon economy if their commitment to green initiatives is wavering.

Canada’s oil firms have invested in recent years to reduce their emissions intensity. But Western Canada’s overall emissions increased 14% from 2005 to 2018, as oil output doubled.

INVESTMENT CUTS

Suncor, which made most of the cuts, shelved a C$300 million wind power project and a C$1.4-billion cogeneration plan, which would replace coke-fired boilers with natural gas units at its base operations, reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants.

Suncor vice president of sustainability Jon Mitchell said it and other green investments hinge on the financial health of the company’s core business extracting crude.

“The deferral and delay in some of those projects does not diminish their importance,” he said.

Cenovus, which is targeting net zero emissions by 2050, cut its technology budget by 78%, or C$137.5 million, saying in a filing it was only advancing select initiatives that had both cost and environmental benefits. The budget included work on green initiatives such as solvent-aided extraction and a new design for oil sands facilities.

A spokeswoman said Cenovus’s commitment to green targets had not changed.

Canadian Natural put off a C$46 million pilot project that would reduce emissions by extracting bitumen at the mine face, limiting the need for trucks and equipment, the company said. A spokeswoman said that while the company has deferred some projects, its commitment to environmental targets remains.

Filings show that Suncor, Cenovus and Imperial Oil (IMO.TO) most recently budgeted roughly C$1.2 billion combined on research and development annually, which includes green initiatives, aside from capital projects.

Suncor, Canadian Natural and Imperial declined to say how much of those budgets have been cut this year. MEG Energy (MEG.TO) did not respond.

Alberta, heart of most of Canada’s production, reduced environmental monitoring requirements temporarily, saying it was necessary to comply with health orders regarding the pandemic. The suspended types of monitoring included certain water quality tests and some monitoring of soil and wildlife.

Alberta’s move is worrisome, said Jamie Bonham, director of corporate engagement at NEI Investments, a firm focused on responsible investing, which holds stakes in the sector to advocate for green improvements.

“The province is simultaneously opening up the economy – you can go to a barber, get a massage or sit in a restaurant – but you can’t take an environmental reading at a wellsite?” Bonham said.

The pause is only for “short-term relief,” said Kavi Bal, spokesman for the province’s energy minister. He noted that a major commercial carbon capture project began operations this month.

The federal government has used pandemic aid to launch two new green initiatives – cleaning up abandoned wells and loans to help companies reduce methane emissions.

Such steps, however, are too little and too late to draw back many investors, banks and insurers that shunned the industry in recent years, according to a Reuters survey.

Eight investors, banks and insurance companies reached by Reuters, including Royal Bank of Scotland and France’s AXA, that publicly reduced their oil sands involvement in recent years over climate change said industry efforts to reduce environmental impacts did not change their opposition to the sector.

While Canada has set a target of net-zero emissions by 2050, it has not outlined a plan. “Right now we do not have one,” Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan said in May on a panel.

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In a memorandum to U.S. Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen, Perdue said more was needed to relieve burdensome regulations on industries and make federal forests and grasslands more productive.

“These lands are critical for the prosperity of rural communities, sustaining jobs and livelihoods in grazing, mining, oil and gas development, recreation and forestry,” the letter said.

The vision laid out in the letter is in line with the Trump administration’s broad effort to allow more energy extraction and infrastructure development on federal lands and waters.

Perdue directed the USFS to streamline processes and identify new opportunities for mineral extraction, expedite broadband development, and speed up permitting for grazing and logging. He also said the agency should increase recreation opportunities and open public access to more forest lands.

The memorandum also seeks to speed up reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act by setting time and page limits on key environmental study documents.

USFS officials were not immediately available for comment on the letter, which comes a year after the agency published proposed changes for how it complies with NEPA, a decades-old law that requires detailed analysis to be conducted before approving projects that could affect the environment. That proposal has yet to be finalized.

Environmental group Center for Biological Diversity said the letter “offers a dystopian vision of expanding mining, fracking, logging and grazing in national forests” that would increase pollution and carbon emissions, and harm wildlife.

U.S. Representative Bruce Westerman, a Republican from Arkansas, supported the move, however.

“The healthiest forests are ones that are actively managed, not left susceptible to disease and wildfire,” Westerman said in a statement.

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