All Rights Reserved. Eos, Vol. 95, No. 5, 4 February 2014. NEWS. Science Is Key to Decision Making, .... Desert Renewabl
Eos, Vol. 95, No. 5, 4 February 2014
NEWS PAGES 41–42 As secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Sally Jewell oversees a department whose mission involves both the management and conservation of federal lands and natural resources. Jewell’s background as a petroleum engineer, banker with a specialty in natural resources, and CEO of Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) could help her balance various, often competing, interests and manage Interior’s nine agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS); U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement; National Park Service; and the bureaus of Reclamation, Land Management, and Ocean Energy Management. On 27 January, Jewell spoke with Eos about balancing energy development and conservation, dealing with climate change, and the role of Earth science. She said her overall approach to striking the right balance on issues involves “understanding our landscapes using the best science that we have so that we understand where the conflicts are.”
25 June 2013] that deal with carbon pollution really take an important stand.” Jewell continued, “In spite of what you might hear from members of Congress, we continue to hold coal lease sales around the country. I would say that the interest in coal leasing has waned, and a good part of that has to do with fundamental economics and where is coal in its economics versus other sources, notably, natural gas.” Jewell also addressed offshore energy exploration in the Arctic and other potentially sensitive areas, noting that leases for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic were done in the last decade prior to the Obama administration. “Our job is not to unwind the leases,” she said, adding that the department’s objective is to make sure that what has been leased “is developed in a safe and responsible way.” “We want to make sure that Shell and the other operators up there are able to do what we are requiring of them, both in terms of having a relief drilling rig handy in case they have a blowout and need to drill a relief well, as we saw happen in the Gulf [of Mexico oil spill of 2010], and also containment, because if there is oil spilling, we don’t want it going into that sensitive Arctic environment,” she said. “And, as has been well publicized, there were challenges with the containment structure before. But our team is working to make sure that what the companies say the containment system will do, it actually does with a real-life test,” Jewell noted. “With the benefit of science from the USGS and others, we have a sense of what the risk and the potential are in these areas. We’re not going in blind.”
“We need to take the best science that we have available and apply it to everything we know.”
Energy Development One hot issue is coal development. Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), chair of the House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources, has charged the Obama administration with “aggressively pursuing a war on coal.” However, Jewell refuted that. “There certainly is not a war on coal on the part of this administration,” she said. “There is a significant part of our electricity infrastructure that does not have alternatives to coal right out of the gate, and the administration has done a lot of work, notably through the Department of Energy and the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], in addressing the carbon pollution associated with coal. But we also recognize that there are BTUs [British thermal units] generated by coal that generate electricity that are important to this country, and it’s an asset that this country has.” She said, “So we’re not going to wean ourselves from coal in the near term, but we believe we can support development of coal and the use of coal in a way that’s more environmentally friendly than has been historical practice, and that’s where the parts of the President’s Climate Action Plan [issued on
Striking a Balance During Jewell’s Senate confirmation hearing in March 2013, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.), chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said Jewell’s biggest challenge “will be striking the right balance between the secretary’s dual roles of both conserving and developing our resources.” Jewell commented to Eos, “I am very, very interested in using the kinds of scientific tools that we have available to us—GIS [geographic information systems] mapping, Landsat, the geospatial database, those quantitative means of information that we have—and blending that with the qualitative on-the-ground [infor-
© 2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
Photo courtesy U.S. Department of the Interior
Science Is Key to Decision Making, U.S. Secretary of Interior Tells Eos
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell mation] that says, you know, for conservationists, what are the areas that are too special to develop and why? For tribal communities, what are the areas that are too sacred to develop and why? To the development interests, what are the areas of highest potential, and what kinds of things can you do employing technology to minimize the impacts on those things that are special?” “So if you go into these discussions about development or conservation with a common set of facts and understanding that’s based in science, you have a much better opportunity to reach common ground and agreement and not spend all of your time in lawsuits, which, for the business community, undermines their certainty and clarity that their shareholders or their owners are looking for, and, for conservationists, it burns a lot of resources tying things up in court without any kind of a certain outcome. So that’s what I’m trying to do to strike the right balance,” she said. Jewell pointed to some examples of trying to find a balance, including an initiative in 11 western U.S. states on a sage grouse habitat conservation plan to protect the species so that an endangerment listing and regulatory burdens could be avoided, as well as the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan to protect tortoise habitat, sacred sites, and recreational areas and allow for renewable energy projects in California.
Climate Change Jewell said Interior has multiple roles related to climate change. “We have to be part of the solution in terms of renewable energy, in terms of reducing the carbon pollution from conventional energy, and also addressing the problem through adaptation and mitigation of our landscape,” she said. Some of those measures, as well as Interior’s involvement with the federal Interagency
Eos, Vol. 95, No. 5, 4 February 2014 Methane Strategy, are laid out in the Climate Action Plan. In an effort to reduce emissions of methane, a significant greenhouse gas, Jewell has met with officials and oil and gas representatives in several states, including North Dakota, which is underlain by some of the Bakken formation, which contains rich oil and natural gas reserves. “There is a real concern on the part of companies as well as the state on the venting and flaring of methane that’s happening at the wellhead in these oil and gas developments because there’s a lack of a gas infrastructure to capture it,” she said, adding that there are some science-based challenges. “We want to be a partner with industry. We will push them, but also we have to be practical. Flaring natural gas is better than venting methane. We want to make sure that the venting, which is not just methane but other volatile organic compounds, is minimized.” Jewell also mentioned some other measures the Interior Department is taking, noting that 13.3 gigawatts of renewable energy currently are permitted on public lands and that Interior has “a major role to play in understanding
and mitigating the impact of climate change.” She said one example is how USGS undertook detailed lidar mapping of the U.S. East Coast in advance of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 to better assess the impact of the storm and understand the effects of development and green infrastructure in the region. She stated, “We can apply that science and understanding so that we are better prepared and more resilient to climate change in the future. So money from Hurricane Sandy relief is leveraging that science that the USGS and the Fish and Wildlife Service notably on the ground provided to address infrastructure rebuilding in a way that’s more resilient to future storms.” Jewell added that such storms “are going to be the case based on scientific predictions around climate change.”
Role of Scientists Jewell told Eos that science is key to her decision making. “We need to take the best science that we have available and apply it to everything we know. The scientists need to be at the table in all of the decisions that we
© 2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
make, and they have been during my time at Interior,” she said, adding, “We are blessed with some amazing tools. We are blessed with Landsat 8 in combination with Landsat 7 that gives us a really clear picture of the Earth every 8 days.” “Our Earth scientists are providing invaluable data to businesses, to industries, to local governments, to farmers and ranchers, to Indian tribes to make really smart decisions about the resources we use at a time when we’re seeing an acceleration of change around us and we’re trying to figure out what to do,” she said. “Given the craziness that we’ve been operating under in terms of continuing resolutions, sequestrations, and shutdowns, I just couldn’t be more proud of the scientists that we have throughout the Department of the Interior, but particularly the USGS, in soldiering on in spite of all of this stuff to provide this data that’s going to be absolutely critical to understanding our planet’s systems and adapting to them in the future.”
—R ANDY SHOWSTACK, Staff Writer
