Interior Department emails that came to light on Friday confirm that protecting companies’ ability to mine oil, gas, and coal was a primary concern as the agency moved to shrink two national monuments in Utah last year.
“We’ve long known that Trump and Zinke put polluter profits ahead of our clean air, clean water, public health, and coastal economies. This is more proof,” Alex Taurel of the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement. “On Zinke’s one year anniversary as secretary, the evidence of just how embedded Trump and Zinke are with the dirty energy of the past could not be clearer.”
Thousands of pages of correspondence and documents, uncovered by a lawsuit filed by the New York Times against the department after it failed to comply with an open records request for the materials, show that Interior staffers compiled estimates of how many coal reserves were located in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as the agency was reconsidering the protected land’s boundaries.
“The Kaiparowits plateau, located within the monument, contains one of the largest coal deposits in the United States,” wrote Interior officials in a memo last spring. About 11.36 billion tons of coal were “technologically recoverable,” if the plateau lost the government’s protection, according to the memo.
After Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s review of the boundaries concluded in August, Grand Staircase-Escalante was shrunk by about 47 percent.
Another document showed officials asking staffers to compile information on “annual production of coal, oil, gas, and renewables (if any) on site [and] amount of energy transmission infrastructure on site (if any)” and to examine how President Barack Obama’s decision to create Utah’s national monuments had prevented mining in the area.
Bears Ears National Monument was the subject of an email from an aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to the Interior Department in March 2017, about a month before Zinke began his review.
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