Just days before leaving office, then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt ordered federal officials to use a risky legal strategy to advance a controversial road project through a wildlife refuge in Alaska, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO and Type Investigations — a move that if implemented, could erode public land protections across the state.

The January 15 Bernhardt memo to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to move forward with the permitting of a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska stunned critics who have opposed the project for more than two decades.

The post ‘In the Dark of Night’: Trump’s Interior Chief Snuck Murkowski an 11th-hour Win appeared first on Type Investigations.

The Trump administration is sparing nothing in its effort to auction off leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the January 20 inauguration. A week and a half after the election, while the president was busy trying to overturn the results, the Department of the Interior issued a call for oil-lease nominations, which allows companies to choose parcels of land to bid on. Then, on December 2, well before the 30-day nomination period had closed, Interior officials announced that a sale would take place just two weeks before Biden’s inauguration.

But a cloud of uncertainty looms over the entire effort to begin oil and gas extraction in the refuge. The Audubon Society, Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and the Gwich’in Steering Committee have filed lawsuits challenging the adequacy of the environmental review process. The incoming Biden administration has vowed to protect the refuge and could delay or possibly revoke any leases that are issued. Under pressure from the Sierra Club and other groups, major banks in the US, Canada, and Europe have pledged not to finance projects in the Arctic—an ecologically fragile region that is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet—including the wildlife refuge.

The biggest unknown, though, is whether the oil industry still has much interest in what would be a very costly and controversial effort to drill for oil in one of the last great wilderness areas in the United States. This isn’t just a matter of companies keeping quiet about their intentions: Because there’s so little publicly available data to evaluate the coastal plain’s resource potential, it’s unclear whether drilling in the refuge makes economic sense at all.

The only seismic surveys ever done in the refuge were carried out in the mid-1980s using technology that is now obsolete. The results of the lone test well drilled on refuge lands around the same time are a closely guarded secret, but a 2019 New York Times story suggested that they were disappointing. When the Trump administration placed Alaska at the center of its “energy dominance” agenda, it invested heavily in updating resource assessments of the entire North Slope region. In May 2017, then–interior secretary Ryan Zinke ordered the US Geological Survey to carry out new studies of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPRA; located west of the existing petroleum hub of Prudhoe Bay) and the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge.

“I'm a geologist,” Zinke said when he signed the secretarial order in Anchorage. “Science is a wonderful thing: It helps us understand what is going on deep below the surface of the earth. We need to use science to update our understanding of the … Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

First, Interior spent close to $1 million to have the original 2D seismic data of the refuge reprocessed, believing that a favorable assessment could increase interest in a lease sale, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. In addition to acquiring higher-resolution data, the USGS also carried out fieldwork in the refuge, sampling rock outcroppings and oil seeps in areas believed to have high hydrocarbon potential. By the end of Trump’s first year in office, the agency was poised to complete the first new assessment of the refuge’s coastal plain in over 20 years—research that would enhance the public’s understanding of the geology of the region and also provide industry with a better sense of where the most promising oil and gas reserves may lie.

But in early 2018, Interior officials abruptly canceled the coastal plain assessment. USGS has been sitting on the reprocessed seismic data ever since. Senior officials at Interior have refused to let USGS share the data with anyone—including the Bureau of Land Management, which is overseeing the leasing program and drafted the environmental impact statement.

This isn’t the first time that science has been sidelined or suppressed in the rush to open the refuge to drilling. During the environmental review process for seismic surveys of the refuge in 2018, the findings of career BLM officials were altered to minimize potential impacts to polar bears and Native communities. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the 19.3-million-acre refuge and whose scientists have studied it for decades, has been largely shut out of the review process.

Resource assessments have also been highly politicized under the Trump administration. In late 2017, the head of the USGS energy and minerals program resigned in protest after then–deputy secretary David Bernhard pressured the agency to turn over prepublication data from a forthcoming assessment of the NPRA, in violation of USGS fundamental science practices. When the assessment was released, DOI boasted that it showed a “HUGE increase” in oil and gas potential and that the “path to American energy dominance starts in Alaska.”

It’s impossible to know if the coastal plain assessment based on the reprocessed seismic data would have changed the outlook of the lease sale or the environmental impact statement itself. As part of the environmental review process, BLM comes up with “reasonably foreseeable” development scenarios that are based in part on USGS estimates. David Houseknecht, a senior USGS research geologist who heads up the Alaska program, said that the agency had analyzed about 50 percent of the data but that he was unable to comment on the findings.

The post The Trump Administration Rushes to Sell Leases in the Arctic Refuge, But How Much Oil Is There? appeared first on Type Investigations.

“If you vote for Biden, he’ll listen to the scientists,” Donald Trump told a crowd of thousands at a recent campaign rally in Carson City, Nevada. The current president, on the other hand, has routinely taken pride in dismissing the recommendations of federal scientists, whether on the handling of the pandemic or the risks of climate change. On both topics, his contention is the same: that the sorts of policies they might recommend—from measures to control the spread of Covid to participation in international climate accords—would only hamper economic growth. “If I listened to scientists,” Trump said at the rally, “we’d have a country in a massive depression instead of—we’re like a rocket ship.”

Now, in the final days of his first term, there are signs that the Administration’s disregard for scientific expertise may be morphing into outright meddling. On climate change, in particular, the White House seems to be taking increasingly aggressive steps to undermine government research as Election Day draws near. Last month, the acting chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was removed from his position after asking political appointees to acknowledge the agency’s scientific integrity policy, according to the New York Times. That news comes in the context of a recent, broader effort to fill out top positions at NOAA, the government’s leading climate research agency, with hard-line climate skeptics. And just last week, WIRED learned that a Trump appointee’s long-standing plan to distort the use of climate models at the US Geological Survey may at last be coming to fruition.

The post Trump’s Attacks on Climate Science Are Coming to Fruition appeared first on Type Investigations.

“I learned a lot about Covid,” the president boasted Sunday in a video message from the hospital at which he was being treated for the infection. Meanwhile, at least half a dozen members of his inner circle of advisers have also tested positive, following months of disregard for standard public health guidance. This pigheaded indifference to the facts of the pandemic, and unwillingness to change behavior, has not been limited to the Oval Office, though. We’ve seen it creep into the Department of Health and Human Services, too, and even the president’s Coronavirus Task Force.

The post ‘He Didn’t Want Any Covid-Related Studies’ appeared first on Type Investigations.

A last-minute effort to approve seismic surveys of potential oil reserves in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the end of President Donald Trump’s first term is underway — and could see that work begin this winter.

An application to conduct seismic surveys was submitted to the Interior Department in late August, according to two people familiar with the process, and the agency is scrambling to complete its work in about half the time it would normally take. The applicant, Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, initially told the agency it had hoped to begin the surveys as soon as December, one of those sources said.

The post Trump Administration Eyes Speedy Permit for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Seismic Tests appeared first on Type Investigations.

Jim Reilly had only been in charge of the US Geological Survey for seven months, and already things were getting hot. It was December 13, 2018, and he was about to give a keynote at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference, billed as the largest gathering of earth and space scientists in the world. Reilly is a petroleum geologist and former astronaut who has logged more than 850 hours in space, 22 days in deep-sea research submarines, and four months on the glaciers of West Antarctica. But among the more than 8,000 government employees who now served under him—many of whom were in attendance at the conference—the affable, lanky Texan was something of a stranger. So when he approached the ballroom lectern on that Thursday afternoon, he knew just where to start: “I wanted to talk very briefly,” he said, “about ‘who the heck am I?’”

For those in the earth science community, there was a far more pressing question to be answered. Just a few weeks earlier, on the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration had released—dumped, really—a landmark, 1,500-page federal review of the risks of global warming, the Fourth National Climate Assessment. Two of Reilly’s top scientists had helped to oversee the project, which drew heavily on research done at USGS and other federal agencies. But the White House had gone out of its way to discredit the report: “It’s not based on facts,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters a few days after its lackadaisical release. “It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.” As the new director of the agency, Reilly hadn’t made any public statement on the matter, and it wasn’t clear exactly where he stood.

Forty-five minutes later, as Reilly finished up his conference presentation, that mystery remained. “The most important thing about flying in space is changing your perspective,” he told the audience of scientists. A final slide went up: Earth, as seen from orbit. “All those things that you and I see as differences here on the ground disappear in space,” he said. “You don’t see some of the differences that you might see politically in space. It’s really all about the planet, and that’s what we do at USGS.”

It was not until the Q&A that AGU’s then president, Eric Davidson, gently put the new director on the spot: “I think many of us found it a little—maybe more than a little—discouraging,” he said, referring to Huckabee Sanders’ attack on climate modeling. “So what’s your advice to your scientists, to the rest of us in AGU who are working on providing datastreams to help constrain models, about trying to communicate that basis for the science of climate change?”

Key Findings

• Reilly has made it a key part of his mission to ensure that climate change models focus only on the shorter term. This direction allows the department to look away from the more distant horizon — where less is certain but where the greatest risks to the planet lie.

Behind the scenes, that very issue—how to constrain models, and then communicate them—had already inspired one of Reilly’s most ambitious and divisive efforts at the agency. At its heart was a plan to reorient USGS research away from long-term thinking, to shrink its perspective. The idea, laid out in a memo Reilly drafted for Ryan Zinke, then the secretary of the interior, in December 2018 and obtained by WIRED, would be to develop department-wide “climate change decision-making” guidelines that focused only on the next 10 years, so predictions could be made—and acted upon—with maximal confidence. That meant the policy process would disregard the distant future, where climate impacts could be cataclysmic.

Key Findings

• The plan was laid out in a memo prepared for Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke in December 2018. It was also evident in a $40 million non-compete contract with an academic consortium which signaled its support for the shorter-horizon approach.

Reilly had hinted at this plan during his conference presentation, showing what he called the “spaghetti chart” of climate model pathways, extending from 1950 to 2100. In the middle of the chart, from the present day up until around 2040, the spaghetti strands are sheathed together—the models well-aligned because, over the next few decades, the levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere are already accounted for; and the other, most important variables, such as El Niño weather patterns, are beyond the control of humans. But off to the right, the same strands splay out like noodles plopped into a pasta pot: a bath of boiling unknowns, a tangle of “emissions scenarios” that follow from whatever choices we make in years to come. Reilly warned the audience that it’s risky to set policy based on these far-out reaches of the modeled climate curve—there’s far too much uncertainty. So instead, he said, he’d like the agency to take a narrower view: “What’s gonna happen over the next 20, 30, 40 years? How far out can we push that and still stay within a statistically relevant trajectory?”

Key Findings

• This effort to dampen climate change concerns was also reflected in White House efforts to alter the summary findings of the Fourth National Climate Assessment — steps largely in line with Reilly’s efforts.

For many in the audience, this must have sounded obtuse. In fact, these furthest reaches of the climate pathways—the tips of the spaghetti—are the very ones that matter most for policy, says Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State and the former chair of the National Research Council’s panel on abrupt climate change, who was also at the conference. By the time you get to the end of the century the greatest source of uncertainty derives from what we as a society do—or fail to do. The imprecision represents an opportunity, then: a chance to navigate a safer, flatter curve into the future. Put another way, by focusing exclusively on climate projections for the next few decades, where there isn’t much to argue over, Reilly’s plan enforces helplessness. “The shorter the window you worry about, the less you do to reduce emissions,” Alley says.

In the conference ballroom, Ericson tried to press Reilly on this topic, as it related to the comments from the White House. “Of course there’s a left and a right to these issues,” Reilly answered. “It’s all politics—and my position on the science is that science has no politics.” Reilly would come back to that favorite phrase again a moment later: Science has no politics.

COURTESY OF USGS

The "spaghetti chart" of climate-change scenarios.

By this point in the session, though, it was easy to imagine that the new director might really mean the opposite. Within the federal government, the USGS has long been a bastion of independent-minded research—“policy neutral but policy relevant,” its staffers like to say—with a grand and vital mission to describe and understand the Earth. Almost one-third of the agency’s first 47 employees, upon its founding in 1879, were members of the National Academy of Sciences. But now, it seemed naive to wonder whether science has any politics. A different proposition was on the table: Under Reilly’s leadership, and in this Administration, would politics allow for that much science?

When you're an astronaut, there isn’t always time to think ahead. The first spacewalk, in 1965, lasted just 10 minutes. The longest one that Reilly ever took during his 13-year career at NASA was just shy of eight hours—a standard workday spent inside a spacesuit, tethered to a craft, installing solar arrays on the Destiny module of the International Space Station. Even then, there’s barely time for contemplation. “Your head’s in a fish bowl, and you get an opportunity to look at the planet ... and the only thing between you and the planet 250 miles away are your boots,” Reilly said during a presentation to the Geological Society of America in November 2018. “But, as you might imagine, you only have about ten seconds to get that gee-whiz moment.”

Geology, as a discipline, often involves the study of “deep time”: the profound magnitudes of history, a billion-year continuum on which continents drift and break apart, and the climate sways from ice to fire and back again. But the work at USGS can also come down to crucial moments, not so much gee-whiz as oh-shit: A seismic wave from far away hits a laboratory instrument, signaling the onset of an earthquake, and there’s a narrow interval in which to issue an alert. “You might have 20 seconds or 120 seconds, it isn’t much for you and I,” Reilly told the audience at AGU. But for a gas utility, this could be the margin needed to shut things down and prevent a series of explosions. The same is true for tornado warnings, flood alerts: Every minute, every second, counts.

That’s where Reilly seems most comfortable—in the zone of near and consequential outcomes, measured and assessed with extreme precision. As a logistical engineer at NASA, he’d been responsible for multi-staged tasks that require months of planning and for which the margin of error could be razor thin. “You get one shot to get it right, and if you don’t get it, you’re stuck,” says Danny Olivas, who was Reilly’s partner for his eight-hour spacewalk in 2007. More serious mistakes, of course, could be fatal. On his first mission in 1998, Reilly was in charge of choreographing the transfer of thousands of pounds of supplies and equipment to the Mir space station. “He did that just masterfully,” says Terry Wilcutt, the flight’s commander. “He can take a complex task and break it down into executable pieces and then it just goes smoothly.”

NASA

James Reilly, NASA astronaut, in 1997.

But what USGS scientists do is in a sense the opposite of logistical engineering: Much of the agency’s research is based on stitching together a diverse array of data and observations, both in the lab and in the field, in order to better understand the planet. That’s true whether scientists are estimating petroleum reserves in the Permian Basin or the rate at which glaciers are melting in Montana. Doubt is often pervasive, and USGS scientists must think very carefully about how to address it. “You have to be comfortable with the uncertainty, or at least not paralyzed by it,” says one former scientist at USGS.

Reilly’s arrival at the agency brought a clash of cultures, then, between the spacemen and the modelers. “He really cannot grasp that dealing with climate science is not an engineering problem,” says the scientist, who has worked closely with Reilly.

Reilly, who is in his early sixties, holds a PhD in geosciences, but he’s had no previous management experience in federal government nor was he a very active member of the research community. Indeed, before he was appointed by President Trump, few at the agency had even heard of him, according to interviews with USGS employees. Following his stint at NASA, he served as dean of the school of science and technology at a for-profit, online university and started a consulting firm; all while leaving little public record of his political leanings or personal beliefs. At the time of his US Senate confirmation hearings, one headline stated, “Nominee to lead USGS is hard to read.” Reilly even cracked a joke about his atypical career path at the Geological Society meeting, speaking as the first astronaut ever to lead the agency. “How did I get either of those jobs?” he asked. “I have no clue and I’m not asking.”

In fact, Reilly’s name had been floated as a possible candidate by his good friend Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, another former astronaut who happened to have contacts in the Trump administration. In addition to flying on the final Apollo mission, Schmitt has made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of climate science. In 2018, during a panel discussion, Schmitt was asked about his doubt that human beings are causing climate change. “There is no evidence,” he said. “There are models. But models of very, very complex natural systems are often wrong.”

Model-bashing has been a favorite pastime among those who deny that humans are the primary drivers of climate change. This makes perfect sense, since it’s the models that dictate action: They show what might happen if we continue down our current path and hint at how we might avoid it. If the models can’t be trusted, or if their scope is limited, then the future is unknowable; and if the future is unknowable, then what’s the case for regulation? That’s why the most heavily polluting industries have been incentivized to focus on climate models’ flaws, in much the way that commercial interests have tried to shower doubt on research into the long-term health effects of asbestos, smog, and cigarettes (among many other things).

Indeed, a network of conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, have consistently pushed the notion that climate models are defective, which has in turn become a central talking point at the White House. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation told The New York Times Magazine that 66 of its employees and alumni had joined the federal government. Schmitt happens to be a former board member and policy adviser at the Heartland Institute. William Happer, a professor emeritus at Princeton who has compared climate models to Enron’s accounting practices—and described those who believe in them as members of a “cult”—also has close ties to Heartland, and was, until recently, a top Trump adviser.

Reilly’s own efforts to constrain the use of models have been insistent, and his steadfast aversion to the long view seems also to apply to USGS itself. Several government employees I interviewed for this story said they’d gotten the sense that Reilly views climate models as the mishandled tools of a broken, antiquated institution—and one that’s filled with broken, antiquated researchers. More than a dozen current and former employees told me that his tenure at the agency has been both morale-crushing and hostile, especially for the agency’s longest-serving scientists. These claims may be addressed in a report focused on Reilly from the Inspector General’s office at the Department of the Interior that is set to be released later this month. According to multiple sources who served as witnesses for the IG, Reilly has effectively purged the agency of senior-level employees who had been close to his predecessor; while elevating a former NASA employee to serve as his deputy director, and intervening to install a former astronaut and friend, C.J. Loria, as director of the Earth Resources and Observation Science Center. “There are people in the survey whose careers he has destroyed,” says one senior USGS employee interviewed by the IG’s office.

A separate report, related to an age-discrimination case, has already been completed by the department’s Office of Civil Rights. In 2019, a 63-year-old woman who had worked for the federal government since the early 1980s complained that Reilly had ordered her duties stripped the year before, because he knew she planned to retire and wanted to “speed it up and make it happen.” Reilly denied the allegation, but the Office found in the employee’s favor at the end of August and said USGS must take corrective action and provide documentation of whatever disciplinary measures are adopted. (In response to requests for comment about the Office of Civil Rights report and the IG report, a USGS spokesperson provided the following statement: “Independent, unbiased science is foundational to the USGS and critical to the 21st Century global challenges we face. Dr. Reilly has endeavored to uphold scientific principles by strengthening operational standards, challenging norms, encouraging internal debate and pushing the organization to greater heights to meet those challenges.“)

Several witnesses in the age-discrimination case told investigators they’d heard Reilly grouse about all the “gray-haired” people at the agency, and imply that younger people should be hired in their place. The director had even said as much in public. A few days before Reilly spoke at the AGU meeting, he’d been asked to sign a stack of 40-year certificates, honoring his veteran employees. “The good news is, people love their jobs, they come to work and they are still there,” he told the audience during his conference presentation, in reference to that paperwork. “The bad news is, they’re still there. No, I’m kidding!”

Meanwhile, about 20 scientists from the upper echelons of USGS had convened with Reilly on the sidelines of the conference. Many were meeting the director for the first time. But he seemed less interested in honoring their years of service than lamenting the absence of younger scientists, according to a person who was present. That person recalls that Reilly looked around the room, and noted that the agency is just too old. (Reilly declined to comment on this episode.)

“This was the moment, when he’s sitting there with the senior scientists … and telling us we were redundant and useless. That’s when I realized we were really screwed,” the attendee says. “That was my light bulb.”

In May 2019, at a meeting with his G-7 counterparts in France, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency made a provocative announcement. It was tucked into a joint statement of environment ministers released after the summit, just beneath a recap of the Trump Administration’s plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The US pledged to “re-examine” climate modeling on an ongoing basis, it said, in such a way that “best reflects the actual state of climate science in order to inform its policy-making decisions.”

A government spokesman later clarified, “Currently, there are no specific efforts [of this kind] underway at EPA.” As for specific efforts of this kind in other parts of government, the spokesman didn’t say.

In fact, the language from the summit closely mirrored Reilly’s thoughts on what to do at USGS. Hints of his proposal would come to light a few weeks later, when the New York Times published a front-page story saying that Reilly had ordered his agency to narrow its horizon for climate projections to 2040. In an all-employee email sent the next morning, and obtained by WIRED, Reilly disputed that account: “As you should know there has been no such directive given,” he wrote. The agency had embarked upon an effort to “develop and refine” how the Department of the Interior uses climate models for decision-making, the email said, and related guidelines would be issued soon. “In the meantime, keep doing the great work we do in the Survey and remember: science has no politics.”

But new reporting from WIRED and Type Investigations—including conversations with more than 20 current and former government employees, and a review of several hundred pages of internal documents—reveals a more extensive effort to reframe the way that USGS scientists use modeling in their research. It’s true there was (and is) no hard cutoff for projections: Reilly’s draft directive on the subject, circulated among senior staff this past July and obtained by WIRED, suggests that projections run to 2045, “as an initial assessment range.” Still, Reilly has made it very clear that he wants to keep the focus on that narrow frame whenever possible; and in pursuit of this agenda, he has overlooked the guidance of his staff scientists in favor of a highly-unusual relationship with an outside contractor.

The push appears to have begun soon after he was confirmed. According to emails obtained through a FOIA request, that’s when Reilly began laying the framework for a partnership with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of colleges and universities that manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The center is one of several institutions that develop models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other climate researchers. Reilly paid a visit to its Colorado campus during his second week on the job. By the end of 2018, USGS was in discussions with the consortium about a possible contract to review climate models.

As the details were being worked out, Reilly sought advice from the consortium on the internal policy memo that he’d prepared for Zinke, which floated his proposal for new, department-wide guidelines on the use of climate modeling. Every five years a team of USGS and NCAR scientists would evaluate the latest data to revise those models, the memo said. The idea would be to provide DOI with the tools needed to respond to climate change “within a statistically manageable range of possibilities”—i.e. on a 10-to-20-year horizon.

Scott Rayder, a former chief of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was then a senior adviser at the consortium, responded with his feedback. “This looks stellar,” he told Reilly. “I think this is a huge step forward.”

Three months later, on March 19, NCAR was awarded a non-competitive $40 million contract to advise USGS on a wide range of issues including “models, observations, computational resources, data services, and education and outreach.” Though the language in the contract is expansive—in theory it could encompass just about any USGS initiative—Reilly would, in private emails, clarify his interest. In a message dated May 7, he asked Rayder to confirm the scope of work: “Will this agreement cover and operate in a way to support our 60-month review of climate change models?” Rayder responded that he thought it would. (In a written statement, the consortium said Reilly’s memo was “consistent with the briefings he received from NCAR scientists.”)

According to multiple USGS sources Reilly’s handling of the memo violated agency norms. “It may have run afoul of regulations prohibiting the sharing of non-public information,” says Debra Sonderman, who was the procurement executive at DOI for nearly three decades before she retired in 2017. Policy memos, which USGS rarely drafts, are not typically shown to outside entities particularly during the early stages of their development. Members of the private sector are not supposed to be involved in their production, says Sonderman.

Miguel Villarreal / USGS

A USGS field crew measuring the density of grasses in southern Arizona.

The size of the contract is also noteworthy: According to federal contracting data going back to 2008, USGS has only worked with the consortium in charge of NCAR on a few occasions and for far smaller sums. Its largest contract with the consortium was a one-year, $60,000 research and development project in 2009. USGS said all federal regulations were followed in pursuing the non-competitive award.

A consortium spokesperson said the group’s researchers frequently provide guidance to federal agencies on a variety of climate-related issues. But the spokesperson added, “We do not necessarily know how our comments will ultimately be used, and whether a particular memo … is for internal policy or another purpose.”

In a written statement to WIRED, Reilly echoed what he’d written in his all-staff email, that he has not issued “any directive that restricts the development or use of climate models by USGS researchers or limits projections of climate impacts past 2040.” He also said, “USGS will continue to use all accepted models and scenarios” and to “assess the entire range of reference scenarios from best-case to worst case in its scientific studies.”

Yet when Reilly assembled a team of his own top climate researchers to draft a white paper on modeling in 2019, not long after the Times story was published, some within the agency understood it as a means of building scientific cover for a plan to narrow the time horizon. “We were all very much painfully aware of the 2040 thing,” says one of the scientists tapped for that assignment.

The white-paper team had frequent phone calls with Reilly as he tried to guide the process, and tried to explain the rationale for making long-term projections. Reilly wasn’t interested. “He didn’t want to understand it,” says the scientist who was on the team. “He wanted to justify his position.” During one exchange, Reilly asked the scientists to cut a relatively benign sentence that read: “To fulfill their missions successfully, natural resource managers often must consider future risks including those stemming from climate change.” In another, according to the scientist, Reilly raised questions about a graph showing a set of IPCC models and what might happen under different emissions scenarios—a version of the “Spaghetti Chart.” Reilly went into his spaceman spiel: He said there were so many variables going into these scenarios, the scientist recalls, that it would be impossible even to make a statement about them, let alone a policy decision. (USGS said that the agency’s fundamental scientific practices were followed during the development of the paper.)

This represented a fundamental misunderstanding of what these models are designed to do, according to that scientist. It’s not about making firm predictions of what will happen in the year 2100—of course you can’t do that. It’s about preparing yourself for the full range of potential outcomes, and understanding how they might depend on decisions that we make today. “You very clearly can say something,” the scientist explains. “You can say we are going to be significantly worse off if we don’t do something.”

The white paper, titled “Using Information from Global Climate Models to Inform Policy Making—The Role of the USGS,” was quietly published in June. Reilly’s meddling appears to have been shrugged off. The paper highlights the utility of modeled scenarios that project 100 years or more into the future. “Examining a range of projected climate outcomes,” it says, “is a recommended best practice.”

In late-October 2018, not long before Reilly gave his “who the heck am I?” speech to the AGU, an interagency fight broke out among some of the federal government’s leading climate scientists and administrators. The Fourth National Climate Assessment was on the verge of being released, and a set of political appointees were pressing for some last-minute changes. In particular, officials at NOAA, led by chief of staff Stu Levenbach, wanted to dispense with any broad-brush overviews of the report’s key findings, including italicized phrases such as “ climate change is expected to cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property,” and “climate change increasingly threatens Indigenous communities.” Instead, these officials argued, the summary should emphasize the full range of possible outcomes by enumerating them separately for each emissions scenario. (Levenbach declined to comment for this story and referred questions to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. OSTP did not respond to requests for comment.)

Some members of the advisory board for the US Global Change Research Program, which coordinates and oversees the National Climate Assessments, worried that the proposed changes would make the document much less useful and accessible for non-scientists. According to one member, the board felt that the changes pushed by Levenbach might also end up misleading readers on important points, such as the degree to which the assessment actually focuses on climate projections.

“It created some tense moments,” another board member told me. At that point, the program’s acting chair was Virginia Burkett, a USGS veteran of more than 30 years. Burkett is an internationally recognized climate scientist—she was part of the team that won the Nobel Prize for the IPCC report in 2007—and has always tried to keep her distance from political entanglements. “As a scientist,” she said in a 2014 interview, “I think you lose credibility if you become a table-banging activist.” But when the last-minute request for edits came in from NOAA, Burkett stood firm. “Virginia, as the chair at the time, you know pushed back pretty hard,” the board member said.

In the end, Burkett’s faction held the line and none of the requested changes were put into the report. But according to the senior USGS employee, Reilly was deeply dissatisfied with the process and the way Burkett handled it. (Burkett declined to comment for this story.) In 2019, he told Burkett that he would be replacing her as program chair. Her successor turned out to be Wayne Higgins, a NOAA climate scientist who had been involved in negotiating the requested changes on behalf of Levenbach. “She paid a big price for sticking her neck out,” said a former government scientist who was intimately involved in the Fourth Assessment. USGS said Burkett was replaced because it was time for another member agency to chair the research program.

Despite these machinations, and however much the Trump administration tried to spin the Fourth Assessment, they arrived too late to make a difference. Much of the work on that report had already been completed by the time Trump took office; and so—just like the climate curves on Reilly’s “Spaghetti Chart”—the short-term outcome was never really in question. It’s only by looking forward that one can spot the bigger dangers: The Fifth National Climate Assessment is due out in 2023, and if Trump is reelected, his Administration will get to shape what is arguably the most important policy document on climate change produced by the federal government. In the meantime, Reilly’s plan to re-examine—and perhaps restrict—the use of climate models will have had a chance to gestate further. And all along the way, the hottest-ever years on record will continue to accumulate. This past May, in the midst of the pandemic, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 417 parts per million. It was the first time this has happened in at least three million years.

If Trump loses, though, then Reilly will almost certainly be out; and there’s no way to know for sure how the next administration—and the next USGS director—might approach these problems. That’s what happens when you’re doing geoscience on a political timescale: The future only lasts until the next election.

The post The Trump Team Has a Plan to Not Fight Climate Change appeared first on Type Investigations.

Later this year, the Trump administration is expected to fulfill a decadeslong Republican dream. The Department of the Interior will likely sell the first leases for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening up to development the last remaining stretch of protected land along the North Slope.

For the oil and gas industry in Alaska, which has been especially hard hit by the global pandemic and economic downturn, it will be a bit of welcome good news. For Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), whose father spent much of his Senate career fighting to open the refuge, it will be a legacy-defining moment. And for Donald Trump, who campaigned on expanding domestic energy production, it will be a chance to claim a “promise kept” as voters head to the polls. Democrats continue to oppose development in the refuge. A recent amendment to an appropriations spending bill from Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) would bar any lease sale from happening, and, if elected, Joe Biden has promised to permanently protect the refuge.

Steve Wackowski, the department’s senior adviser for Alaska Affairs and a former campaign manager for Murkowski, has been central to that effort. Though he’s little known outside of Alaska, Wackowski, a 38-year-old with connections to the oil and gas industry and no experience in federal land management, has played an outsize role in executing the administration’s priorities. And he has done so with a heavy hand, frequently clashing with agency scientists and using the power of his position—the only Department of Interior political appointee outside of Washington—to intimidate those who are seen as standing in the way. Early on in the environmental review process, FWS employees were told that if they raised concerns about the science or suggested overly protective measures for the refuge their name would be identified to Wackowski as an “obstructionist.” At one point, according to multiple sources, Wackowski threatened to fire the FWS regional director and transfer the refuge manager after an internal memo was leaked to the Washington Post .

According to interviews with more than a dozen current and former DOI employees, including three who previously held the position of senior adviser, Wackowski has frequently involved himself in scientific matters typically left to career employees and has often favored corporate interests.

“Part of the job is having the agencies carry out top-level policy directives,” said Pat Pourchot, who served as senior adviser for Alaska Affairs during the Obama administration. But he added, “You’ve got to keep a hands-off approach to honest, deliberate agency research and processes.”

Wackowski has done the opposite. In an unprecedented move, Wackowski was named co-chair of the international board that manages the Porcupine caribou herd, one of several important species the refuge was created to protect. The position has traditionally been held by FWS personnel. In that role, Wackowski has prevented the International Porcupine Caribou Board, made up of U.S. and Canadian members, from weighing in on the environmental review for oil and gas leasing in the refuge. Drilling in the refuge could disrupt the caribou’s traditional migration patterns and the way of life of native Alaskans who depend on them.

Wackowski, who previously worked for a company that conducts polar bear research on behalf of the energy industry in Alaska, has also been closely involved in the review process for seismic surveys of the refuge—used to locate oil and gas reserves—an activity that could threaten the already imperiled polar bear population in the southern Beaufort Sea. The federally listed subpopulation has declined by about 40 percent in the past few decades. By meeting with one of his former colleagues who works for a company that does polar bear surveys and sometimes provides data to FWS, Wackowski was found to have violated his ethics pledge, according to a recent investigation by the DOI inspector general. The report found that neither Wackowski nor the business benefited from the interaction and that Wackowski had acted under the mistaken belief that the communications were permissible. But one FWS employee in Alaska said Wackowski’s frequent contact with his former colleague was “very awkward” and raised concerns among staff internally. “He has done a lot of things prior special assistants haven’t done.”

DOI did not respond to detailed questions for this story. In a statement, a spokesperson referred to the allegations as “baseless” and a “disgusting” attack on Wackowski’s character. “Mr. Wackowski is a trusted member of Interior leadership who cares deeply about serving Alaskans and the American people,” DOI said.

Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Caribou and geese at Teshekpuk Lake in the North Slope.

But outside of the department and among some career employees, Wackowski’s performance has been viewed as the triumph of politics over science with long-term implications for the environment and public health.

“Given Wackowski’s background,” said Deborah Williams, who held Wackowski’s job for five years during the Clinton administration, “it is important to ask whether he, in his role as senior adviser, is representing the public interest.”

Caribou are one of the defining features of the Arctic landscape and also a staple of what is still predominately a subsistence diet among Native communities on the North Slope. The Gwich’in, who live just outside of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and oppose any development there, refer to the coastal plain as the “sacred place where life begins” because it serves as the birthing grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd. The village of Nuiqsut, which sits west of the refuge and is now surrounded by oil development, has already seen notable changes in behavior of the central arctic herd, which, according to a recent USGS study, has begun to consistently avoid developed areas.

Not long after he was appointed in 2017, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO from a former DOI employee, Wackowski took an unusually keen interest in the Bureau of Land Management’s approach to evaluating effects to caribou. He involved himself in the technical details of the environmental review process for oil and gas drilling in sensitive areas, sometimes dismissing the work of career employees and contractors who have worked with the department for decades, according to the documents. At one point, just three months into the job, he abruptly canceled a public meeting on the impact of development in the village of Nuiqsut without explanation, angering the tribal government. Meanwhile, DOI has also disbanded the North Slope’s subsistence advisory panel, which had been designed to foster communication and information sharing between the department and local governments.

According to the documents, Wackowski also has played a key role in shaping the department’s assessment of the impact of development on hunting and other resources, which will have long-lasting implications for the North Slope. In October 2017, when BLM was drafting its environmental analysis for the Greater Mooses Tooth 2 project—a major ConocoPhilips development in the National Petroleum Reserve west of the refuge—Wackowski effectively undermined the methodology used to evaluate how new infrastructure including roads, well pads and pipelines would affect subsistence use in Nuiqsut.

In a preliminary analysis largely drafted under the Obama administration, BLM had concluded the development would likely have a significant impact on when and where hunters pursued caribou—a finding that in theory could lead to the implementation of mitigation measures to make up for any losses. This is exactly what had happened with the earlier Greater Mooses Tooth 1 development in 2015 and it had prompted new mitigation rules by the Obama administration. In that case, ConocoPhillips paid $8 million into a reserve fund to offset a variety of negative effects on environmentally sensitive areas including wetlands and on subsistence use. (In one of his first executive orders, Trump rescinded the Obama-era policy and mitigation became voluntary.)

Wackowski largely rejected the BLM designations “major, moderate or minor” that had been used by the agency for years to indicate the estimated environmental impact on subsistence of the project under review. On a conference call in October 2017, he vigorously challenged the conclusions of the BLM experts and the contractor, whose research showed that just under 50 percent of Nuiqsut’s hunters were likely to modify their behavior if GMT2 were approved. Using DOI criteria and past practice, that would constitute a major impact. Using mostly anecdotal evidence, Wackowski argued that hunters in Nuiqsut had adapted to the ongoing development and that if fewer than 50 percent of them changed their hunting behavior then the impact would not qualify as major.

At one point, according to a transcript of the phone call obtained by POLITICO, Wackowski accused a BLM employee of “misusing” and “misrepresenting” the data. He also told the agency its “analysis was not sound.” The contractor said the findings were based on “hard data” and that impact criteria were “very useful.” Even though the BLM conclusions were based on 40 years of research and observation, Wackowski’s view ultimately prevailed, lowering the bar for oil and gas development across Alaska’s North Slope.

After receiving requests from ConocoPhilips and the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, one of the largest landowners in Alaska and a Murkowski supporter, BLM agreed to remove the impact criteria from the draft environmental impact statement. “We received feedback from both DOI personnel, ConocoPhillips and ASRC that the impact criteria was too subjective and warranted review and refinement,” the project coordinator wrote in an email to the BLM Alaska state director.

One former BLM employee raised concerns that removing the impact criteria might violate scientific integrity. “Without knowing how far this will go, I would say that I seem to be verging on violating some of the core ethical principles of [my field],” the employee wrote to a supervisor.

Wackowski was appointed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke as co-chair of the advisory board that provides recommendations on management of the Porcupine caribou herd, replacing a longtime Fish and Wildlife employee, though he appears to have no expertise in the subject. (Wackowski has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s in science and technology intelligence.) The International Porcupine Caribou Board is made up of delegates from the U.S. and Canada and has long advocated for protecting the refuge’s coastal plain, where more than 200,000 caribou migrate and give birth every spring. After traveling across the coastal plain, the herd makes its way into the Canadian Arctic and is an important resource for First Nations people in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. According to the agreement that established the board in 1987, one of its primary objectives is to “conserve the Porcupine caribou herd and its habitat” and to minimize adverse long-term effects.

Sitting on the board has given Wackowski an opportunity to influence the group’s response to what will be the most profound change the refuge has ever seen. (At one point when the acting director of FWS was preparing for hearings on the refuge, Wackowski sent him background material in which he claimed that, “caribou do NOT calve in the 1002 area.” This was incorrect: the coastal plain, sometimes referred to as “the 1002,” provides critical calving habitat for the caribou.) “It was a surprise to us,” said Craig Machtans, the Canadian co-chair of the caribou herd board. “FWS had a member in good standing as chair. And they replaced him.” It was a surprise to the FWS, too, which was not notified of the change until a month after it happened, according to an FWS employee.

“What they were trying to do was shore up control and influence on anything related to the coastal plain,” that FWS employee told POLITICO.

One way of doing that was by preventing the board from weighing in on the environmental impact statement and suggesting a preferred alternative, which required consensus from members on both the Canadian and U.S. sides. Canadian members of the board were eager to submit comments on the draft environmental impact statement for oil and gas leasing in the refuge but needed the cooperation of their American counterparts. Though the Canadians were ready to move forward, Wackowski and other members on the U.S. side wouldn’t agree to submit comments, which effectively prevented the board from doing so. In the end, the Porcupine caribou board did not comment on what is the most important development to take place in the refuge since it was created 40 years ago.

Wackowski has also tightly controlled public information related to the refuge.

In August 2018, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the coastal plain—the largest ever recorded on the North Slope—rattling homes in the village of Kaktovik and sending tremors as far away as Fairbanks, hundreds of miles away. Normally the U.S. Geological Survey, which is part of DOI, would respond quickly to such an event, often fielding calls from reporters around the world and explaining any risks to the human population or nearby infrastructure. (In this case, there were concerns that the Trans-Alaska pipeline could have been damaged.)

But this time, USGS was slow to respond to several queries. According to Freedom of Information Act documents obtained by POLITICO, early that morning Wackowski sent an email to the USGS regional director reminding her that any inquiries related to the wildlife refuge needed to go through him; this was a departure from the usual protocol for handling a major natural disaster, which allows USGS to bypass even normal channels of approval within the public affairs office “when timeliness is critical for public health and/or safety.” Instead, Wackowski told USGS he wanted to review media requests and be given time to “pipe up on any concerns” before interviews with staff scientists were granted.

Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

An oil pipeline stretches across the landscape outside Prudhoe Bay in the North Slope.

More than 24 hours later, and long after the state’s earthquake center had put out a news release stating that it “anticipate[d] a very active aftershock sequence,” USGS officials were still asking Wackowski if the agency’s leading expert on the subject could share information with the media.

“What made this unusual is that USGS had to seek permission to talk about an earthquake,” a former USGS employee familiar with the department’s response told me. Even then, USGS had to assure DOI officials it would not comment on the potential impact of the earthquake on future oil and gas development in the refuge—one of the most important and politically sensitive priorities for this administration—according to emails leaked to POLITICO.

Because the quake happened in such a remote location and there were no injuries it barely registered outside of Alaska. But Wackowski’s attempt to control the messaging is part of a broader pattern in DOI to limit debate and discussion on anything to do with the refuge. Wackowski, according to several career employees, has made it difficult for them to freely share information that might be perceived as hindering the administration’s pro-development agenda. He has also suggested that FWS staff could be removed from the review team or even lose their jobs if they raised concerns about the science or imposed overly restrictive measures on oil and gas development in the region. “If you come across as not being on board with that, your name could get elevated to Steve Wackowski as an obstructionist,” one FWS employee who has since left the agency was told by a supervisor.

Even as Wackowski has influenced the flow of information within his agency, he has actively sought data outside the department from a former colleague, a violation of his ethics pledge, according to a report by the DOI’s inspector general. Wackowski has been intimately involved in the research and review process for seismic surveys in the refuge. He communicated and met with a former colleague who does polar bear data collection and mapping on the North Slope. This triggered an ethics investigation by DOI’s inspector general. According to the recently released report, a DOI ethics attorney said that if they had known about Wackowski’s contact with his former colleague “they would have advised against it.”

DOI wouldn’t confirm that Wackowski was the subject of the report but told The Hill in an emailed statement: “The report is clear that the senior interior official in question acted responsibly and with the highest integrity.” The statement also attributed the events to a “miscommunication and misunderstanding” between Wackowski and the ethics office.

Before he joined DOI, Wackowski spent several years doing drone-operated survey work for Fairweather Science, a company that provides an array of services to oil and gas companies operating in the region. Fairweather is one of the only companies that conducts polar bear den monitoring using infrared cameras, which has become an increasingly important part of the permitting process as sea ice diminishes and greater numbers of bears come inland to den during the winter months. The refuge’s coastal plain has become an especially critical region for polar bears, with the highest density of denning habitat along the North Slope.

According to the inspector general’s report, in late 2017, Wackowski requested polar bear data from his former colleague to be used for a “FWS/USGS/BLM science experiment.” The Trump administration’s ethics pledge prohibits political appointees from meeting with former employers for two years; Wackowski, who had been working for Fairweather until he joined DOI, was communicating with his former colleague just several months after he was appointed, which the IG’s report considered to fall under its prohibition. The following year, Wackowski participated in a meeting with the same colleague in which polar bear research and data was discussed. He did not contact the DOI’s ethic’s office on either occasion. Wackowski told the IG that he believed conflict of interest rules did not apply to communication involving “purely scientific data” even though no such exemption exists for current federal employees.

The post The Man Determined to Deliver Trump’s Alaskan Oil Promise appeared first on Type Investigations.

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Last week, two of the country’s most popular national parks—Grand Canyon and Zion—announced that they were closing due to the coronavirus pandemic. Grand Canyon’s first positive case—an employee who worked for a concessionaire that operates the largest lodge in the park—was confirmed on Sunday, March 29. The park closed three days later. By the time Zion closed its gates, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States had far surpassed that of any other country, and the White House was warning of a grim week to follow. “We feel the park’s closure is essential to limiting the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Utah,” the mayor of Rockville, a town of just under 300 people outside of Zion, wrote in a letter to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt.

The Interior Department’s reluctance to close parks—especially those that draw large numbers of tourists—even as the pandemic is sweeping across the country is being criticized by current and former National Park Service staff who say that the inconsistent messaging and leadership’s failure to take decisive action is putting staffers, the public, and rural communities at risk. Today, more than 200 national park sites remain open. In contrast, Canada closed all of its national parks, historic sites, and marine conservation areas on March 25.

“The DOI response has been dangerously uneven and contradictory,” a veteran Park Service employee in Nevada told Sierra. “I would just describe it as chaos.” Even the NPS office of public health has urged stronger action. According to an April 3 memo obtained by Sierra, the office’s epidemiology branch chief has advised the Interior Department to restrict park access in communities where stay-at-home orders are in place and to discontinue dormitory-style housing for new employees and concessionaires. Failure to limit visitation to national parks, the memo warns, will increase the risk of negative outcomes for the federal workforce and the public.

“We can say with absolute certainty,” the memo states, “that leaving our parks open to the public when social distancing is not being practiced, onboarding employees originating from throughout the country and world, and permitting significant shared housing environments will result in a significantly greater burden of disease and death than if we had taken the proactive measure to continue to close these parks and/or limit operations.”

Other observers agree that the Interior Department’s actions have been irresponsible. The National Parks Conservation Association has called for the closure of all national parks and described the Interior’s approach as “beyond reckless.” Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources have asked the DOI to clarify its policy.

In many ways, the Interior’s handling of the public health crisis has mirrored that of the Trump administration more broadly. The department initially seemed to downplay the risk; in a March 5 memo, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt suggested that the virus was not spreading widely and that most people in the US had “little immediate risk of exposure.” According to one Interior employee who works out of the Washington, DC, office, as late as March 13, when school districts across the country had begun to close, it seemed like “all systems normal” at the Interior. Then, on March 18, Bernhardt announced that the department would be waiving entry fees at all national parks to make it “a little easier for the American public to enjoy the outdoors.”

At a moment when many people were craving open space, fresh air, sunlight, and perhaps an opportunity to get away from it all, the impulse was understandable. But it sent the wrong message: Already crowded parks saw a surge in visitors, sometimes overwhelming facilities and staff even as public health officials were encouraging Americans to practice social distancing or simply stay at home. Meanwhile, some parks were beginning to close—the Washington Monument shut down on March 14—but there seemed to be little coordination among NPS sites, and many of the busiest destinations remained open. Numerous parks across the country modified operations but didn’t close, leaving the public to navigate a rapidly evolving situation. At Joshua Tree in California, the park limited access to foot and bike traffic on Mach 21, but only updated its website that morning, which led to chaos and confusion at trailheads and parking lots.

Interior has since said that it is closing parks when local officials and in particular state or county health departments make the recommendation to close. On March 18, for example, Moab took the unusual step of closing campgrounds and hotels to all nonessential visitors. But Arches and Canyonlands, two of the most visited parks in the region, didn’t shut their gates until 10 days later. And it appears that the standard for closing has not been applied in every case.

Joan Anzelmo, who worked for the Park Service for 35 years and lives outside of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, says the NPS should have had a more coherent strategy from the very beginning as the dimensions of the pandemic came into focus. In early to mid-March, Anzelmo was already observing an uptick in visitors to Grand Teton. She was also hearing from concerned Park Service colleagues across the country, from Estes Park outside of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and Grand Canyon, to Moab and parts of Hawaii.

On March 17, Anzelmo sent an email to National Park Service director David Vela, urging him to close all national parks and begin preparing for the wildland fire season, which is sure to be complicated by the pandemic. “An agency has to act quickly in a crisis,” Anzelmo said. “They have to have a unified message.”

Instead, the Park Service has taken a piecemeal approach, frequently closing sites only after media attention and local officials have exposed the dangers of keeping them open. As this story was being reported, dozens of parks and wildlife refuges across the country were still grappling with how to handle the spring season and a possible influx of tourists. Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which lies in Arizona and Nevada and is one of the most visited NPS sites in the country, is still up and running with bathrooms, picnic areas, and beaches open on the Arizona side—this despite stay-at-home orders in both of those states.

Parks are also struggling with how to handle the hiring of seasonal employees, who make up a substantial portion of the workforce, often come from out of state, and typically live in dormitory-style housing. In fiscal year 2019, the Park Service hired over 6,000 seasonal workers. As of last week, parks were still debating how to properly test, house, and quarantine workers coming into small communities from all over the country for the summer season, which is the busiest time of year for most national parks.

On April 5, Vela issued a memorandum limiting seasonal hires to essential workers such as law enforcement, fire, maintenance, and custodial staff through May 24. According to the memo, the use of shared housing for these workers must align with guidance from the US public health service. But the memo also notes that parks must be prepared to quarantine employees who test positive for the coronavirus and who may live in shared housing arrangements.

The Park Service did not respond to requests for comment.

Like all federal agencies, the parks are also scrambling to acquire the necessary personal protective equipment for employees who interact with visitors or who have to clean bathrooms and other facilities. According to an internal memo reviewed by Sierra, the NPS is developing a strategy for placing back orders with contractors as it develops a “longer-term solution for finding scarce supplies.” But the NPS employee in Nevada worried that the move wouldn’t be enough. “Big parks are going to eat through this stuff like candy,” the staffer said.

On paper at least, the Park Service should have been better prepared to address the coronavirus outbreak. Park Service employees are often confronted with high-risk situations, from search-and-rescue missions to simply managing large numbers of tourists from all over the world in areas where interactions with wildlife and natural features like cliffs and waterfalls can be dangerous or even deadly. The Park Service even has a little-known epidemiological unit that conducts human and veterinary disease surveillance and coordinates public education and messaging on related issues. In 2015, this division led the investigation into two human plague cases in Yosemite as well as multiple outbreaks of tularemia, a rare infectious disease that can affect animals and people. In 2010, the agency implemented a program that was designed to give individual parks greater leeway in addressing such risks at the local level and the power to recommend closure when necessary.

But the Trump administration, according to reporting by Mashable’s Mark Kaufman, has largely disregarded this bottom-up approach. Even as a number of individual parks, including Grand Canyon, were recommending closure, Interior officials seemed unwilling to act. According to the Interior employee in Washington, the layers of bureaucracy and approvals required from top officials—including Secretary Bernhardt—have crippled the agency’s decision-making powers. “In the case of the Park Service, he takes a keen interest,” the employee said. “It’s the most visible part of Interior.”

As of this writing, 10 National Park Service employees and two US park police employees had tested positive for the coronavirus, which accounts for a third of all confirmed cases at the Interior, according to two sources with knowledge of the figures. Meanwhile, rural communities with limited health care infrastructure in gateway towns are bracing for an increase in the number of sick patients. Anne Newland, CEO of North Country HealthCare, which operates a network of clinics in northern Arizona (including the only facility in Grand Canyon), says it’s inevitable that they will see more positive cases. The Navajo Nation, which straddles several southwestern states and is surrounded by major parks, has seen one of the worst outbreaks in the country. And in Flagstaff, Arizona, the only major hospital serving Grand Canyon Village and the neighboring community of Tusayan is already at capacity for critical care patients.

“My fervent hope is that the direction from [Arizona] Governor Ducey to stay at home, that people will follow that,” Newland said. “Because if we limit social contacts, we can limit the spread of the disease.”

Even if the spread of COVID-19 peaks in the coming weeks, and social distancing measures begin to flatten the curve, questions about how national parks will handle the busy summer tourist season remain unresolved. At this point, it seems unlikely that there will be any kind of systematic parkwide approach to addressing the pandemic.

“Every park is like its own independent ship,” the NPS employee in Nevada told me. “Every park is kind of doing its own thing.”

The post As National Parks Remain Open, Staffers Worry They Are at Risk appeared first on Type Investigations.

On a cold, windy day in late October, in one of the most remote and least populated regions of the state, a half-dozen workers prepared to drill another test hole in the arid volcanic rock. They were looking for deposits of lithium, a metal that has become indispensable to smartphones and electric-vehicle batteries, and which geologists estimate is so abundant here that mining companies from around the world are vying for a chance to make the next big discovery. The workers doing the drilling were contracted by Ioneer, an Australian company that has already invested millions in exploring what it believes could be one of the largest lithium producers in the world with an estimated net value of nearly $2 billion.

Like almost all of the surrounding territory, this land is owned by the federal government and overseen by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. I had come here because I had learned that the Rhyolite Ridge project was threatening a rare wildflower called Tiehm’s buckwheat that is not known to grow anywhere else in the world. Standing with me on the ridgeline overlooking the work site was Patrick Donnelly, the state director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group that over the past three years has established itself as one of the most determined—and successful—foes of the Trump administration’s efforts to accelerate mining and development on public lands. The Rhyolite Ridge project boundary sits atop the plant’s tiny 21-acre habitat and from what Donnelly could see, the work was already having a damaging impact. Donnelly pointed to newly graded roads on the site, including a path that cut through two of the main populations of the flower. Three weeks before, Donnelly had filed a petition with federal and state officials to have the plant listed as an endangered species. Now, on a holiday weekend, the mine was buzzing and Donnelly was livid. He had seen nothing like this level of activity on three visits over the summer.

“What’s changed?” he asked. “Since September 1, well, we submitted our petition.” But rather than BLM limiting exploration activity at the site as Donnelly had hoped, the work appeared to have significantly expanded. “It’s like BLM is doubling down,” he said.

The Bureau of Land Management—BLM—approves the mining permits on all federal land. Since its creation in 1946, the agency has had a dual mission to balance the demands of industry and environmental protection. In this part of Nevada, that job falls to the BLM’s Battle Mountain district office, located more than 250 miles away. But according to a sweeping whistleblower complaint filed on October 4 by Dan Patterson, a five-year BLM employee and obtained by POLITICO and Type Investigations, the Battle Mountain office has repeatedly disregarded its own environmental rules and regulations to fast-track permits on public land. The historic antipathy toward federal oversight common to this region, combined with a presidential administration that has announced its hostility to decades of environmental law, has left public lands especially vulnerable.

“This ... is more than disagreement with the decisions of his superiors,” the attorney with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who is representing Patterson, wrote in the complaint, “but stems from a sincere belief that the laws of the United States are being disregarded for the professional expediency of his superiors and the benefit of private parties, and that a culture of lawlessness has been engendered.”

M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

Town of Tonopah, Nevada shown morning of Jan. 11, 2020.

According to Patterson’s complaint, the BLM district office has, over the past several years, ignored longstanding requirements that stem from the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act; approved mines and drilling without adequate review, turning the region into a “clearinghouse for federal permits”; and taken personnel off mining inspections in order to expedite development. In one case, according to the complaint, a mining engineer was removed from the review of a high priority open pit gold mine after making a recommendation to mitigate the long-term effects of toxic wastewater, which the company opposed because of cost. In another case, a group of well-connected families had been allowed to build recreational cabins on public land under the guise that they are actively mining. The whistleblower’s complaint also alleges that a lithium mine in Silver Peak, on the other side of Rhyolite Ridge, has illegally expanded onto BLM land without obtaining the necessary permits. Since raising questions about the district’s conduct, Patterson says he has faced retribution from his supervisors and is now on leave without pay.

The Department of the Interior’s inspector general is evaluating the allegations in the whistleblower’s complaint. In an emailed statement, BLM officials said they “stand ready to assist and provide information to the Office of the Special Counsel or the DOI Office of the Inspector General if asked.” Until that investigation is complete, BLM said it could not “comment on the truth or accuracy of the whistleblower complaint’s allegations or of Politico’s characterization of such allegations.”

M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

Tiehm's buckwheat, a rare wildflower not known to grow anywhere else in the world.

But of all Patterson’s allegations, the Rhyolite Ridge project—which pits a foreign mining corporation against a handful of environmentalists defending a rare, ankle-high wildflower—epitomizes how vulnerable the regulatory apparatus has become to pressure from the Trump administration. In 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on minerals deemed critical to national security, including lithium, and called for “increasing activity at all levels of the supply chain.” Specifically, the order directed federal agencies to streamline the leasing and permitting processes. In July 2019, while visiting a major gold mine in Nevada, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who has made a point of reducing the time required to conduct environmental reviews, said the mining industry’s gross domestic product has increased 39 percent since Trump took office. In an interview with an Australian business publication, Bernard Rowe, managing director of Ioneer, the Australian company behind the Rhyolite Ridge project, said, “This designation of critical minerals that President Trump introduced a while back started the ball rolling in terms of streamlining permit process times and requirements, and our project has certainly been a beneficiary of that.”

BLM officials in western Nevada have enabled Ioneer to reap those benefits by the favorable way they have chosen to interpret and enforce existing environmental laws. Mining companies can avoid long and costly environmental reviews during their exploration phase as long as they disturb no more than five acres. But in this case Ioneer filed two separate notices, both just under the five-acre limit, about a mile and a half apart but within the boundaries of the same project. This, the whistleblower alleges, violates federal regulations that prohibit operators from so-called “segmenting” in order to avoid a preliminary environmental review.

Rowe disputes the whistleblower’s claims and says the filing of the two exploration notices was justified and that the project boundary was not firmly established at the time. “We did that based on our view that this was not segmentation,” Rowe said.

Rowe also underscored that his company is committed to sustainable development and that the project is part of a larger effort to transition away from the use of fossil fuels, particularly in the transportation sector, which is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The company also says it will protect the rare plant and has taken measures to ensure its survival.

But conservation groups like Patrick Donnelly’s, which is not categorically opposed to lithium mining, contend that the exploration work is already damaging the plant’s habitat. Conservationists fear that if the 640-acre proposed mine is ultimately approved, it will drive the buckwheat to extinction. The petition to have a plant listed as an endangered species can take years, even decades. Meanwhile, Ioneer says it hopes to begin production by 2023, and hopes to complete its mandatory environmental review in one year, a timetable that is unusually fast for a project that has raised questions about the survival of an endemic species.

Arnold Tiehm, who discovered the buckwheat in 1983 and for whom it is named, says the plant’s existence is precarious. “You could wipe the buckwheat out with a bulldozer in a couple of hours,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

Dan Patterson, a Tonopah-based environmental protection specialist with the Bureau of Land Management, sits for a portrait among the mountains of the Kawich Range.

When Ioneer filed its notices of exploration in 2018, Dan Patterson was the only environmental protection specialist in the Tonopah field office (BLM says there were four environmental protection specialists in the larger Battle Mountain District). Patterson was in charge of compliance at an office that oversaw roughly 6 million acres of public land, what Patterson says is an unusually large range by BLM standards. Nevada alone accounts for nearly half of the active mining claims that BLM oversees. The territory overseen by Patterson’s office included hundreds of mines, each of which he was able to visit once or twice in any given year.

Since 2017, Patterson says, the agency has permitted “far more development on public lands than the agency could ever monitor or enforce. And that’s something everybody should be concerned about.”

Patterson grew up in Michigan and studied resource management at Michigan State University before moving to Arizona in 1994. He has lived out west ever since. In 2008, Patterson was elected to the Arizona Legislature, where he served on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee but was forced to resign three years later after a House ethics investigation found he “verbally abuses, assaults, and harasses his colleagues.” Patterson has publicly and strenuously disputed the investigation’s findings.

One of his most recent jobs was at the Center for Biological Diversity, where he was a public lands campaigner and director of the group’s deserts program. When he transferred to BLM in 2015, he hoped he could bring his environmental expertise to bear on one of the agency’s busiest field offices. He quickly earned a reputation for being a staunch defender of public lands who was willing to work closely with local environmental advocates. He was not shy about pointing out violations (he had also worked for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog group) and what he saw as his superiors’ reluctance to stand up to the mining interests.

The Rhyolite Ridge project was especially troubling to Patterson. In June 2018, after an initial inspection of the site, Patterson learned that Tiehm’s buckwheat was on BLM’s list of “sensitive species”—plants or animals that require heightened attention to prevent them from becoming threatened or endangered. In fact, BLM had known about the plant’s existence and location for years.

After his first visit, Patterson, concerned that BLM was not doing enough to protect the plant’s habitat, sent Donnelly an email on June 15 with photos of the buckwheat and the project area. Patterson describes himself as a “desert plant geek” who felt compelled to share some information about what was unfolding at Rhyolite Ridge.

“It was basically like an FYI: ‘Have you heard about Tiehm’s buckwheat?’” Patterson said.

M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

A monitor well near a proposed lithium mining site in the Rhyolite Ridge area.

He hadn’t. Donnelly reached out to the small handful of botanists and other officials familiar with the Rhyolite Ridge site. Scrappy and outspoken, Donnelly and the Center for Biological Diversity have challenged the Trump administration’s push to expand oil and gas development and mining in the state. Recently, the center scored a major victory against the administration’s attempt to overhaul a sage grouse conservation plan that had been enacted during the Obama administration. As a result of the lawsuit, Nevada pulled more than 300,000 acres of public land from a recent oil and gas lease sale.

One of the experts whom Donnelly consulted about Tiehm’s buckwheat was Jim Morefield, a botanist with the state department of conservation and natural resources, who had first surveyed the Rhyolite Ridge site in 1995. Morefield wrote that the plant, a profligate seed producer that provides nourishment for small mammals and pollinators, already met the definition of a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. He strongly suggested that BLM and the state of Nevada do more to protect it, including removing habitat from future mineral exploration. “Immediate and aggressive measures are needed to prevent its extinction and to protect it sufficiently to avoid formal listing,” Morefield wrote. But Morefield says he is not aware that the state acted on his recommendation.

Ioneer knew the plant was there as well. It had even hired a contractor, EM Strategies, to conduct baseline surveys of the plant to determine whether there were additional undiscovered populations and to assess the overall habitat. Like previous researchers, EM Strategies found that the buckwheat’s entire range is limited to Rhyolite Ridge.

Despite the widespread awareness of the vulnerable plant, BLM approved both of Ioneer’s requests for notices on October 19, 2018. The first work began later that month.

Politico

Around that same time, Patterson flagged a second reason for concern about the project. He told his supervisor that he believed the filing of more than one notice was a violation of federal regulations that prohibit segmenting. “The idea that they were not related—that they were two separate projects—it didn’t pass the smell test,” Patterson told me. “In my view, that was segmenting, a recommendation that was not followed by management.”

Rowe, who has 13 years of experience working in western Nevada, said the two notices, though part of the same project area, were geologically and geographically distinct. He also said the project area at that time was more of a concept, not a hard boundary. A BLM map from June 2018 clearly shows the project area encompassing both notices but Ioneer maintains that it was not relevant since it was not part of a formal plan and was subject to change and refinement. Rowe said it is common practice in Nevada for BLM to approve more than one notice in cases like this.

Roger Flynn, who is the founding director of the nonprofit Western Mining Action Project and teaches mining law at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the fact that this has become standard practice is precisely the problem. “I’ve been fighting mines since the early ’90s,” he said. “My gut is that this happens all the time, but it’s hard to tell.”

After drilling more than 40 test holes, Ioneer has finished its exploration work, concluding that the mine has the potential to produce more than 20,000 tons of lithium annually. The company expects to begin full mining operations in 2023. But the fate of the rare plant is unresolved. Actual mining on the 640-acre mine and related construction could have a far greater impact on the buckwheat. Ioneer has not yet submitted its plan of operations, and Rowe would not specify how much of the plant’s habitat would be affected. “It’s certainly less than 50 percent,” he said. Ioneer says it is investing in efforts to propagate and possibly transplant the buckwheat, but botanists say there’s a great deal of uncertainty about whether such a strategy would succeed.

“We’re quite comfortable in saying, to the absolute best of our knowledge, we did not disturb any Tiehm’s buckwheat in any of the work we’ve done out at that site,” Rowe told me recently.

In June 2019, about a year after he first learned of the buckwheat, Donnelly drove over 200 miles to the Tonopah field office to review Ioneer’s exploration notices. At the office he had an hourlong conversation with Earl Numinen, the assistant field manager, and reviewed some of the case files for the lithium mine. Donnelly says Numinen was “fairly transparent” and that he was able to access some of the records related to the project.

M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

Patrick Donnelly, Nevada State Director at the Center of Biological Diversity, walks atop a large water container that was left behind by mine exploration project.

About a month later, on July 8, Donnelly received an unexpected phone call from Perry Wickham, who had recently been named acting field manager of the Tonopah office (Wickham was appointed June 9). Wickham wanted to know what his interest in the project was, Donnelly said. Donnelly had filed two Freedom of Information Act requests related to the project, a normal practice—Donnelly has filed around 50 FOIAs in Nevada in the past three years—but he wouldn’t have expected the office’s top manager to respond directly. According to Donnelly, Wickham told him, “You don’t deal with Earl anymore. You deal with me.”

In an emailed statement about the exchange with Donnelly, a BLM spokesperson said, “As the Tonopah Field Manager, Mr. Wickham has the authority to determine points of contact for information regarding projects in his office.”

Since that call, Donnelly says (and emails from Wickham to Donnelly confirm) that Wickham has tried to limit his ability to access public records, an apparent violation of BLM protocol.

Patterson’s own troubles began around the same time Wickham took over the office.

On July 9, the day after Wickham phoned Donnelly, Patterson returned to work from a two-week assignment as a public information officer for a wildfire in Alaska and was immediately served with a five-day proposed suspension stemming from an argument he’d had with another BLM employee in early June. Patterson acknowledges that he had an argument but said it was a routine dispute that didn’t merit disciplinary action. Patterson had received a superior rating on his performance evaluation in fiscal year 2018.

Patterson thinks the suspension had more to do with the Center for Biological Diversity records requests than the argument. While he was still in Alaska, Patterson had a conversation with the district manager who pressed him on whether he knew anything about the requests. Patterson said he wasn’t aware of the FOIA, though Donnelly had informed him of the request months before in a text message. Later, in a meeting with Wickham, Patterson said he was asked about his previous work for the center.

“They’ve come in here on multiple occasions to look at particular files, specific files,” Wickham told Patterson in an audio recording Patterson provided to POLITICO. “I mean they don’t just come in here and say, ‘Gee, can we just have a random check of files.’ They want specific files.”

Patterson had numerous privileges revoked. He says he was pulled from his work as an information officer on wildfires, which he had done for several years and felt was an important part of the agency’s mission. He also says his telework privileges were taken away, which meant he’d have to spend an extra night in Tonopah and would have only weekends with his family, who lived near Las Vegas about 250 miles away. In an emailed statement BLM said, “Telework and participation in collateral duties related to supporting wildland fire operations are at the discretion of the employee’s supervisor.”

Eventually, Patterson was placed on administrative leave with pay, but that was suspended after two weeks. He remains on leave without pay and has not returned to work. About a month and a half after he was placed on leave, he filed the whistleblower complaint.

“I feel like I’ve been kind of run out of town,” Patterson said.

M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

In the Rhoylite Ridge, a patch of Tiehm’s buckwheat is bisected by a road built by a mining company near the proposed site of a lithium mine.

Early one morning in October, I picked up Patterson in my rental truck and we headed south out of Tonopah to view some of the sites included in his complaint. It was a cloudless day and there were few cars on the road. In the center of town, Patterson noticed Perry Wickham’s white Ford F-150 driving in the opposite direction.

When I glanced in my rearview mirror the truck had already turned around and proceeded to follow us for several miles outside of Tonopah. Patterson suggested I pull off the highway onto an unpaved county road so we could discuss our plans for the day. Wickham’s truck continued on. But about five minutes later, Wickham sped past us, kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel.

Through a BLM spokesperson, Wickham said he followed me out of curiosity after seeing one of his employees riding with a reporter. The previous afternoon I had stopped by the Tonopah field office to review case files and, though Wickham wasn’t there, he instructed his staff to tell me that I needed permission from the state office to access records, which is not standard practice. After about an hour, I was told to leave the office. A BLM spokesperson said it was an “unfortunate misunderstanding” and that the public and media should be permitted to request files from an office at any time.

Adam Federman

Patterson and I drove east toward the Kawich Range to a series of remote 9,000-foot peaks where Patterson, in his complaint, said a group of “politically and economically influential” families had taken advantage of mining claims to build illegal cabins. It was called the Five Jokers mine. One of the original Five Jokers was Roy Neighbors, an influential Nye County administrator, who had also served in the Nevada Legislature. Patterson had seen photos of the cabins in the BLM case file but had never actually visited the site. According to Patterson’s complaint, it was well known among BLM management in the Battle Mountain district that the claims were being abused and had even become a “running joke” within the office.

The state road we were driving on is known as the “Extraterrestrial Highway” because of its proximity to Area 51, the government owned site, where numerous people have claimed they’ve seen alien activity or UFOs. As we headed north on a narrow access road into the mountains the sagebrush desert transitioned to a forest of pinyon and juniper trees. We passed by a stake marking a BLM “Wilderness Study Area,” which pleased Patterson, though he couldn’t recall the last time a BLM employee had been out here. Finally, we came around a bend and saw a piece of plywood nailed to the base of a tree: “5 Jokers Mining Co LLC,” with a phone number below it. The road became too steep to drive up, so we continued on foot for a mile or so passing old legacy mines where there were no signs of recent earth disturbance and abandoned processing equipment that had become overgrown with vegetation. Near the top of the ridgeline we came to a gate with a “no trespassing” sign on it.

In front of us were two modern cabins occupying some of the most remote and breathtaking real estate in this part of Nevada. Scattered about the property were a trailer with flat tires and an old Ford F-250 with a duct-taped driver’s side window and “5 Joker’s Mine” written on the door. There were 400-gallon water tanks with open spigots that had been recently emptied; generators to supply the cabins with running water and electricity; solar panels and an outdoor shower. There were globe lights on a wraparound deck perched on the steep hillside. Nearby Patterson pointed out large metal drums of gasoline or fuel oil. One labeled “leaded racing gasoline” was bloated, indicating it could possibly rupture. According to Patterson, who is trained in handling hazardous materials, storing fuel oil in this manner at active mines is prohibited and remediation is typically required. Patterson took his pocket knife out and dug around in the soil next to the pump where large amounts of fuel had leaked. It wasn’t clear how deep it went. Patterson reminded me that this was all public land; that the Five Jokers weren’t paying any rent or property taxes—just a $155 annual fee to keep the claims active; and that there were no zoning or building standards that they had to abide by.

Daniel R. Patterson

Daniel R. Patterson

Two spartan buildings constructed on the public lands referred to as the Five Jokers mining site.

Sami Neighbors, the daughter-in-law of one of the original owners, files all of the paperwork for the company. (Five Jokers Mining LLC was dissolved in 2018 and transferred to Miles Neighbors, one of Roy Neighbors’ sons. Permits now refer to it as the Five Jokers Mine Project.) Sami Neighbors said all of the records are public and could be accessed through the BLM office in Reno. When asked whether mining was still taking place on Five Jokers claims in the Kawich range, she said “yes” but wouldn’t provide any additional information. The allegations made in the whistleblower complaint were news to her, she said. “We’re compliant,” she said. “That’s the crux of it to me.”

The Five Jokers claim, said Patterson, was emblematic of the way BLM operates in this part of Nevada and much of the rest of the state. In many cases, Patterson alleges in his complaint, the agency turns a blind eye to development and has repeatedly failed to take enforcement action when required to do so.

Later that day, Patterson would show me where Albemarle, which operates the only active lithium mine in the U.S., has engaged in construction on more than 1,000 acres of public land outside the approved boundary of their project, and “removed more than 10,000 tons of mineral materials without a modified Plan of Operations,” according to the complaint. In his complaint, Patterson says BLM officials have been aware of the new construction but refused to take enforcement action or conduct an environmental review. Patterson also says in the complaint he believes the District may be preparing documentation to be retroactively applied to justify the expansion. Albemarle told POLITICO that “We have not received, nor been made aware of, a whistleblower complaint submitted by a BLM employee at the Tonopah Field Office in Nevada. Thus, we cannot comment on it or the allegations.”

Adam Federman

A stack of razed Joshua Trees near the open-pit Gemfield gold mine.

The day before we had hiked up into the Monte Cristo Range where, according to the whistleblower complaint, BLM had permitted road building in protected bighorn sheep habitat in violation of its own prohibition against new road construction there. Old mining claim markers—PVC piping staked into the ground—were still in place and invasive weeds, which thrive in disturbed habitat, had colonized the old roadbed. Since the exploration work and road construction were undertaken, Patterson says he hasn’t seen any bighorn sheep in the area, which he has monitored closely. Although the Tonopah Resource Management Plan, according to Patterson’s complaint, “contains a flat ban on road construction in essential bighorn habitat,” he said his concerns were ignored by management when he raised them.

At the Gemfield open pit gold mine, where the operator was in the middle of rerouting several miles of highway to accommodate the new mine, which had been approved by state and federal officials, we found at least two dozen Joshua Trees—a species conservation groups are pushing to list as endangered—that had been bulldozed into a pile. The removal of the trees had been approved by BLM with few mitigation measures in place. The cumulative impact of the agency’s lax regulatory enforcement was, in Patterson’s view, wreaking havoc on public lands across the state.

Patterson says BLM is underfunded and understaffed and that under the Trump administration the mining industry has essentially been given free rein on public lands. Still he says he’d like to continue to work for the agency. “I want to be in it for the long haul,” he said. “To make a difference for these scenic landscapes.”

According to the inspector general, in an email to Patterson’s attorney, the office has reviewed the complaint and is in the “process of evaluating each of the allegations and determining a path forward.”

M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico

Donnelly and Patterson look for Tiehm’s buckwheat in a patch of high-mineral volcanic-like soil.

“This is the Wild West out here,” Patterson had told me as we toured the Five Jokers site. “You can kind of do what you want. And these guys are doing it.”

Three days after my visit to Rhyolite Ridge with Patrick Donnelly, the Center for Biological Diversity announced that it was suing BLM over its segmenting of the mining exploration notices for the lithium project.

It was the first time the center had challenged BLM on these grounds and had the potential to expose what the center claims is an illegal and likely widespread practice within the agency while also drawing attention to the rare buckwheat. “The Trump administration is ignoring laws protecting rare species like this beautiful flower to give our public lands away to a mining company,” Donnelly said in a news release. “We’re going to court to make sure that Trump and the Bureau of Land Management obey the law and protect this remarkable little plant.” It was the center’s 175th lawsuit in three years challenging the administration’s environmental policies.

But two hours before the deadline for BLM to file its response to the complaint, the agency announced that Ioneer had relinquished the notices and that the agency had terminated them, which BLM claimed rendered the lawsuit moot. The Center for Biological Diversity and Ioneer, which had intervened as an interested party, have since worked out an agreement whereby the center has dropped the lawsuit and Ioneer has agreed to certain terms and conditions to safeguard the buckwheat.

Ioneer must now notify the center whether it intends to pursue any additional exploration activity or when it begins the process of seeking the necessary approvals for building the mine. The company is also required to use hand tools to do a small portion of its reclamation work, such as reseeding grasses along access roads.

Both sides have claimed victory. On January 8, Ioneer issued a news release saying it had successfully resolved the litigation and that there would be “no impact to the company’s ongoing activities related to the project.” Ioneer has also completed all of its exploration work at the site and therefore had little to lose by closing out the notices.

The company has been bullish on the project, recently raising $40 million in investment capital, and has even reached an agreement to supply a Chinese company with 105,000 tons of boric acid, a byproduct of the operation, every year beginning in 2023.

In the end, the BLM has not had to defend the way it issues exploration notices in court, so the legality of controversial practices like “segmenting,” which Patterson and Donnelly say favors mining companies over the environment, remains untested.

“In this administration, we have seen the doors to our public lands be thrown wide open to industry by the BLM avoiding and subverting any environmental protections we have on the books,” Donnelly said. “Sometimes that is through sweeping secretarial orders upending management of public lands but sometimes it’s just guys at their job trying to make the boss happy.”

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