BLM Oil & Gas Leasing: Talking Points for Public Hearings

You will have 2 minutes to speak. Begin by stating your name, profession/former profession, and where you’re calling from.
Start with your personal connection to the lands that could be threatened, if you have one.
Choose 1-2 of the 5 gaps or inadequacies listed below that you want the BLM to address and why it matters.
Share more general frustration or concerns about Trump’s attack on public lands.
Close with 1-2 demands from the list of asks.

Public lands are a refuge for human wonder and beautiful wildlife, not places for oil and gas billionaires to frack, drill, exploit, and pollute.
Our public lands are not for sale.
This plan would sell off our public lands to enrich the President’s corporate friends in the oil and gas industry. Their profits come at the expense of our climate, of Tribal rights and sovereignty, of our clean air and safe water, of wildlife, and of some of our country’s most outstandingly beautiful wild places.
This drilling plan is the latest in the Trump Administration’s politically motivated, obsessive attacks on the safety and well-being of Californians, and seeks to directly undermine California laws that protect the safety of our residents.
California has banned fracking and helped lead the transition away from the fossil fuels that are poisoning our communities and threatening our future. The federal government has no right to take us backwards.

Rescind and revise your plans to open up over 1 million acres of public lands and mineral rights to oil and gas drilling and fracking in California. Specifically:
- Rescind these Supplemental Environmental Impact Statements.
- Update these analyses by disclosing impacts now, instead of deferring to the permitting stage.
- Respect California’s ban on fracking and our state’s health buffer zone law, which bars any new oil wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, businesses, and hospitals.
- Amend the Resource Management Plans to value health and environmental protections over extraction.

Threaten wild places

Drilling is being proposed near the Carrizo Plain National Monument and around popular recreational sites like Pinnacles National Park, Mount Diablo State Park, Henry W. Coe State Park, and Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve.
[speak to your connection and experience of these locations, and why oil and gas drilling does not belong]
These places are home to San Joaquin kit foxes, giant kangaroo rats, monarch butterflies, burrowing owls, California condors, and the California jewelflower. The threats that more drilling poses to these species have been woefully underestimated in the documents. But we know that new drilling means lost habitat, poisoned water, and species pushed closer to extinction.

Undermine and ignore California law

The documents also flout existing California laws. California has banned fracking and enforces a 3200ft buffer zone between oil drilling and communities. These critical laws protect Californians and our climate. The documents suggest BLM intends to ignore these laws and put communities at risk by allowing drilling and fracking near homes, schools, and hospitals.

Threaten our health

The documents also fail to adequately evaluate the harm more toxic oil pollution will do to our health by contaminating the air we breathe and the water we drink. The Central Valley, where much of the drilling is being proposed, is already burdened with the worst air quality in the country. Low-income and communities of color are disproportionately harmed. The documents have not adequately assessed the compounding health harms communities, like those in the Central Valley, will be forced to endure if more drilling moves forward.

Worsen climate change and extreme weather

The documents fail to take seriously the fact that more fracking and drilling will increase greenhouse gas emissions and intensify the climate crisis. From extreme heat, to wildfires, to droughts, to floods, Californians are already bearing the costs of climate change. Extracting more oil and gas from our public lands will turbocharge these costs.

Lack of updates since the settlement

These documents are proposing the same decisions and flawed environmental analyses that the Bureau of Land Management came to five years ago that were challenged in court. These legal challenges resulted in a settlement ordering BLM to redo their analysis. The plans suggest the BLM has not taken its obligation to redo its assessment seriously. Instead, the agency appears to be ignoring the advances in climate science, new special-status species that have been considered or listed for protections, and the most recent studies linking oil and gas extraction to adverse health outcomes that have been published since the settlement.