Earth Matters: Senate Republicans eager to sell public land to build more housing. Think it'll be affordable?

It’s been a long-term dream of many Western politicians and corporate bosses to sell off large portions of public lands that have been managed by the federal government since they were “acquired” from the Native inhabitants a century and a half or longer ago. Especially keen on sales and turning public land over to state governments were the advocates of the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion that began in the 1970s. This got a boost when President Ronald Reagan appointed James G. Watt to a short-lived stint to run the Interior Department. He was a founder and first chief of the right-wing Mountain States Legal Foundation, which fought tribes and environmentalists over land and water issues, among other things.

Fast-forward to 2025.

Public land sales were slated for a slot in the Republicans’ tax-and-spending megabill. No national parks, national monuments or designated wilderness areas would be included. Selling Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management acreage to build housing was a key part of the advocates’ argument. But the House of Representatives yanked the bill’s provision for selling 500,000 acres in Utah and Nevada because that was the cost of getting Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke to vote for the overall megabill. Staunchly conservative, and typically no friend of the environment, he’s an adamant foe of selling public lands.

Senate Republicans, on the other hand, are eager to sell. Their version of the megabill would mandate up to 3.3 million acres of the public land be sold in 11 Western states. But there’s a catch. Some 250 million acres will be eligible for these sales. As Janessa Goldbeck writes:

Let me repeat that: 250 million acres of public lands eligible for sale. Forests, rivers, mountains, migration corridors, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, local recreation lands, critical wildlife habitat, and sacred tribal sites. Public lands held in trust for the American people, handed over without debate to the highest bidder.

The bill mandates that the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture begin selling off at least two million acres of Forest Service and BLM land within 30 days of passage. Every 60 days after that, more must be identified and sold until arbitrary targets are met. This would happen without hearings, without transparency, and without public input.

This is not legislation. It is liquidation.

We’ll see soon enough if the provision survives when the Senate and House megabill versions are reconciled.

Building housing on public lands is not a terrible idea in and or itself. Indeed, since a law passed in 1998, thousands of housing units have been built on 44,000 acres of what had been public land around Las Vegas. Disturbingly, however, only 50 of those acres were set aside for affordable dwellings. And the biggest problem with housing in America is affordability.

In an April guest opinion strongly favoring building housing on transferred federal land, Binyamin Appelbaum at The New York Times wrote that it needed to be done right:

"The great flaw of the Las Vegas program, however, is profligacy. Instead of using scarce land to provide housing that workers can afford, the government has simply cleared the way for more sprawling subdivisions of high-priced homes. In Skye Canyon, a development of 9,000 homes on 1,700 acres of formerly federal land at the northwestern edge of Las Vegas, prices for new homes start above the $469,945 median for the metro area. Since the Las Vegas federal land sales began in 1998, local housing prices have more than tripled."

In a recent analysis, Headwaters Economics concluded that transferring public land would do little to solve the nation’s housing shortage. The researchers wrote, “Our findings show that opportunities are limited to a few states, and are complicated by wildfire and drought risks, as well as other development challenges.” It added that just 2% of Forest Service and other Interior Department land is near enough to where people already live for new housing development to meet the need. About 2.4 million acres altogether. But they also said:

More than half (58%) of the federal land near communities with housing needs also faces high wildfire risk, leaving only about 1 million acres realistically available for safe development. Many of these places also face other hazards, such as flooding and drought.

Still, a million acres isn’t nothing. And that could mean a few hundred thousand new dwellings to reduce the estimated nationwide shortage of 3.8 million houses. Progressives shouldn’t just toss out the concept wholesale. It’s the “done right” part that the current administration cannot be counted on to fulfill.

—Meteor Blades

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WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

RESOURCES & ACTION

Planet Wreckers: Top Global North Countries Responsible for nearly 70% of projected new oil and gas expansion to 2035

GREEN BRIEF

Interior Dept. issues plan to drill in 82% of a federal reserve in Alaska

The North Slope of Alaska provides critical habitat for wildlife, which includes polar bears, brown bears, walruses, migratory birds, foxes, wolves, and vast herds of caribou. But the North Slope also provides hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil each day, and for decades Republicans and Democrats have raucously battled over drilling in the Arctic. They’re at it again, with the Trump administration now resurrecting its reckless 2017 drill, baby, drill policy on what is the single largest contiguous, undisturbed swath of U.S. public land. Members of the public only have until July 1 to comment on a draft environmental review .

In the waning days of his first administration in January 2021, Donald Trump’s Interior Department released a draft plan to open up most of the North Slope’s National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to oil and gas drilling. Under President Barack Obama, about half the reserve had been protected, with the rest open for leasing. Under the draft plan, drilling would have been allowed in 82% of the 23-million-acre reserve, or on about 18.5 million acres.

Just as Trump had reversed Obama’s policy, President Joe Biden said no to Trump’s plan and returned to restricting exploration to a far smaller part of the reserve. To environmental advocates’ fury, however, he also approved the Willow oil project. This will consist of about 200 wells that operate for decades. Otherwise, what had been protected under Obama is protected again.

On Wednesday, however, the Interior Department released a draft analysis that brings back the 2021 plan. This would fulfill Trump’s Executive Order 14153, which makes maximizing Alaska’s resources a high priority. In a press release, Adam Suess, the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, said: “This plan is about creating more jobs for Americans, reducing our dependence on foreign oil and tapping into the immense energy resources the National Petroleum Reserve was created to deliver.”

It’s a bit more complicated than that. As Monica Scherer at the Alaska Wilderness League wrote last September:

Originally established 100 years ago as a petroleum reserve for the changing U.S. Navy, the Western Arctic has a long history of both conservation and oil and gas development. Below is a timeline that illustrates the key moments and decisions impacting this region. Over the last 100 years, we have seen significant changes to our policy priorities. As our planet has continued to change and experienced the worsening impacts of climate change, prioritizing conservation is more important now than ever.

A U.S. Geological Survey report on undiscovered oil and gas resources beneath all federally managed public lands estimated that these contain 29.4 billion barrels of oil and 391.6 trillion cubic feet of gas. Said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the former North Dakota governor who boasts a long and friendly association with the fossil fuel industry: “American Energy Dominance is more important than ever, and this report underscores the critical role science plays in informing our energy future. Thanks to the USGS's rigorous and independent assessment, we're better equipped to manage America’s vast public lands responsibly while supporting energy security and economic opportunity.”

Earthjustice attorney Jeremy Lieb objected: “The lands they plan to open to drilling include “Special Areas” that are essential habitat for wildlife, birds, and fish and are critical for traditional Indigenous subsistence practices. Fossil fuel development in the Arctic threatens these irreplaceable lands and waters and our climate. We will continue to protect these areas against each new threat.”

Which means they’re going to be very, very busy for at least the next four years.

—Meteor Blades

RESEARCH & STUDIES

New Maps Show Best Places for Global Reforestation. Researchers at the Reforestation Hub have posted new maps showing where are the best places to regrow forests to take on the climate crisis. The 482 million acres they say could potentially be reforested is an area 90% smaller than has appeared on previous maps.
Nearly Half of Earth’s Glaciers Are Already Doomed, Even Without Future Warming. Conducted in collaboration with ETH Zurich, the study reveals that if warming is limited to 1.5°C (2.75°F), it would be possible to preserve at least 54% of the non-polar glaciers—more than twice the amount that would survive under a 2.7°C (4.05°F) warming scenario.
Rethinking Biofuels in the U.S. Midwest. A working paper from the World Resources Institute reveals that 30–40% of U.S. corn is used for biofuels that contribute 6% of national transportation energy. While these policies have offered economic benefits to some, they have caused major environmental, social, and economic trade-offs for communities in the Midwest and beyond.
Navigating the black box of fair national emissions targets. Published at Nature Climate Change, the study finds many countries’ emissions-cutting pledges insufficient “in light of fairness,” with serious implications for climate mitigation and financing emissions reductions.
A Third of Forests Lost This Century Will Likely Never Be Restored. A collaboration between World Resources Institute and Google DeepMind, new data reveals that 34% of tree cover losses worldwide from 2001-2024 were likely the result of permanent land use change, with a doubling to 61% in tropical primary rainforests.

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

New protections for nature must account for climate risks, scientists say by Marina Martínez at Mongabay. Scientists say the global push to protect 30% of land and water by 2030 must adopt “climate-smart” planning, using models that anticipate how climate change will shift species’ habitats and stress ecosystems. Many protected areas already face climate disruptions, with research showing two-thirds of tropical forest Key Biodiversity Areas now experiencing novel temperature regimes, threatening the species they were meant to shield. Initiatives like the Climate Adaptation and Protected Areas project are restoring habitats, empowering local communities, and factoring climate risks into conservation strategies across Africa, Fiji and Belize. [...] Protected areas are cornerstones of biodiversity conservation, but climate change is upending the assumptions on which they were built. As temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift, animals and plants are moving in search of new habitats. Areas that once served as reliable refuges may no longer meet the ecological needs of species they were meant to protect. If new conservation zones are based solely on current species distributions, they risk becoming obsolete within a generation.

Mining Expansion and the Erosion of Rhino Conservation and Community Rights from the Environmental Investigation Agency. Southern Africa represents the last significant stronghold for both white and black rhinos, yet mining for coal and critical minerals in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe threatens to erode decades of conservation progress and undermine the rights of Indigenous and local communities who share and steward these landscapes. While governments publicly pledge to safeguard their endangered rhino populations, they simultaneously continue to approve mining projects that directly threaten critical rhino habitat. This contradiction between conservation rhetoric and approved mining concessions raises serious questions about these nations’ commitment to rhino protection. Africa’s rhinos face multiple existential threats including relentless poaching and accelerating habitat loss. The continent’s rapidly expanding mining industry and continued demand for coal has become an alarming new stressor on these vulnerable populations. [...] This growth is a major reason for the fragmentation of critical habitats and encroachment on fragile and previously untouched ecosystems that support some of the world’s most endangered megafauna species such as rhinos.

About half of Vienna's 2 million residents live in social housing. Here, at Biotope City, the social housing has solar panels. Vienna is using social housing to cut greenhouse gases and help adapt to climate change.

Could this city be the model for how to tackle the housing crisis and climate change? By Julia Simon and Ryan Kellman at National Public Radio. At the edge of a wide, grassy park in Vienna, there's a modern building with lots of windows and a sleek wood facade. For the past six years, Sebastian Schublach has lived here with his family in a light-filled four-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. Up on the roof, where Schublach can relax in the communal library with a view of the city and park, there are solar panels to reduce climate pollution. There's a rooftop garden full of rosemary — the greenery helps keep the building cool in summer. Thick, insulated walls reduce the need for heating and cooling — Schublach's apartment doesn't even need an air conditioner. "It's not cold in winter times. It's not hot in summer times," Schublach says. "It's very comfortable." In the United States, high-quality, climate-friendly apartments like this are mostly rare and unaffordable, says Daniel Aldana Cohen, professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of the think tank the Climate and Community Institute. But in Vienna, sustainable buildings like Schublach's aren't just affordable, they're widespread. Schublach's apartment is what the Viennese call "social housing" — housing that's built or supported by the government. Now this social housing is a key driver of Vienna's ambitious climate action.

'Yes, in my back yard'—most people who live near large-scale solar projects are happy to have more built nearby by staff at Tech Explore. Would you like to live next door to a solar farm? Traditionally, it's been thought that although people like the idea of renewable energy plants, they don't want them close by. Now, research investigating how people who live near large-scale solar projects feel about them has found that 82% of people living within an hour's walk of current projects would support, or are neutral toward, new projects in their area. "Most neighbors of existing large-scale solar projects either support or feel neutral about additional projects in or near their communities, with only 18% opposing it," said Dr. Sarah Mills of the University of Michigan, an author of an article in Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy. "Just as has been documented for wind energy, we found that the NIMBY—not in my backyard—explanation for opposition to solar was overly simplistic and unhelpful in explaining neighbors' sentiments."

Lost River suckers in Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon.

A Win for Farmers and Tribes Brings New Hope to the Klamath by Jacques Leslie at Yale e360. In 2021, orthopedic surgeon Karl Wenner, who owns a fifth share of Lakeside Farms near Klamatch Falls, Oregon, diked off 70 of the farm’s 400 acres and flooded them with the farm’s excess water. Almost immediately, the field filled with aquatic plants, which attracted tens of thousands of ducks, geese, and swans. It also began sopping up water-borne nutrients, eliminating the farm’s phosphorus problem. Within two years, plant biodiversity at the farm had doubled, according to an analysis of bee pollen. The farm is now a haven for otters, beavers, muskrats, and at least 140 species of birds⁠. It also provides a home for two gravely endangered fish species revered by local Native Americans: the shortnose sucker and the Lost River sucker. The success of Lakeside’s wetland restoration is only the splashiest of recent positive developments in the Klamath River watershed, which has long been plagued by battles over water quality, water allocation, and the plight of native fish. In the first month after the completion last fall of the world’s largest dam removal project on the Klamath River, more than 6,000 salmon swam upstream past the dam sites, far exceeding biologists’ expectations and reinforcing hope for a broad recovery of deeply depleted salmon stocks. The salmons’ entrance into the upper basin, where they had not circulated for more than a century, seemed to symbolize the interconnectedness of the watershed, inspiring former adversaries to meet and plan next steps in the restoration of the badly degraded river.

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Trump’s EPA to “reconsider” ban on cancer-causing asbestos by Beth Mole at ars technica. On Monday, the EPA filed court documents saying that it "now intends to reconsider the [ban], "and it "expects that this process, including any regulatory changes, will take approximately 30 months." The EPA asked the court to suspend the court case in the meantime. The filing included a declaration in support of the reconsiderations from new EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Lynn Ann Dekleva, who until last year worked as a lobbyist and director for the American Chemistry Council. As reported last year, there was always concern that another Trump administration would work to overturn the ban; Trump supports the use of asbestos. In his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback, he wrote that asbestos is "100% safe, once applied," and blamed the mob for its reputation as a carcinogen, writing: "I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal."

WEEKLY BLUESKY SKEET

ECOPINION

On Democracy, Liberated Energy, and the Perfect Moment by Bill McKibben at his The Crucial Years substack. There is a very real chance that Trump’s plummeting popularity will start changing the political dynamic. We’ll know as we watch the fight over the Big Beautiful Bill. It’s the dumbest piece of legislation advanced in my lifetime, on so many counts—in a moment of gross inequity it accelerates the distribution of wealth toward the richest. And it also threatens to, as the Center for American Progress put it, “crush America’s energy system” by removing the IRA funding for clean energy just as it began to hit its stride. Solar and wind are what we can build fast—and the BBB will stymie all that. (Here’s an excellent guide to organizing against the repeal of the IRA). Which, in turn, lets us think a little about the political meaning of different kinds of energy. The best reason to build lots of clean power is to slow catastrophic global heating, and the second best is to spare the 9 million humans who die each year from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. (That’s one death in five). But the third best reason is because, by its nature, this is liberating energy, in sharp contrast to coal and gas and oil. Indeed, fossil fuel has an inherent quality that we focus on too rarely: it’s only available in a few places around the world, where the biology of ancient times (all those plankton and ferns) piled up to create the deposits of coal and gas and oil on which we currently depend. In the real world, that means that the people who control those small and scattered deposits have way too much wealth and power—which they have used to dominate the rest of us.

Why We Should Care About Low-Carbon Leisure by Johanna Bozuwa at The American Prospect. The crack of a baseball bat. The splash of a child’s cannonball off the diving board. The laughter at a picnic in a park. These are the sounds of reprieve; the moments where we catch up with friends or spend time with our families. Leisure is a critical—but often missing—piece of the political agenda for many progressives, particularly for climate advocates. With the polycrisis at hand, it might be hard to understand why climate advocates should focus on low-carbon leisure. Many people are struggling to meet basic needs in the United States, living paycheck to paycheck. Black and brown families inhale pollution from massive highways or toxic landfills. The climate crisis has destroyed whole communities with wildfires, floods, and hurricanes.But that doesn’t make the leisure agenda less important. Investing political hours—and public dollars—in low-carbon leisure helps cultivate interconnected communities, rebuild the political imagination, and grow a new political base—not to mention helping people survive the climate crisis.

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico in 2015. — Sen. Martin Heinrich

Sen. Martin Heinrich of N.M. on trying to save clean energy incentives, an interview conducted by David Roberts of Volts. Excerpt:

Roberts: Yeah, well, speaking of selling off public lands, Sen. Mike Lee has said publicly that he wants to bring that back in. Is that plausible? Like, I no longer have any baseline sense of what’s plausible or not anymore. You know what I mean? So, like, is that a thing that could happen?

Heinrich: So, I’ve spent my entire — I started out as an outfitter guide working on public land. So, this has been part of my life for all of my adult life. And I really cut my teeth fighting back on a previous effort to sell off our public lands. Would Mike Lee very much like to do that? Sure. The question is going to be, and it’s going to be interesting to see what happens here, is we saw what happened in the House: You’re inserting risk into an already wobbly kind of legislative effort. You never know when the wheels are going to come off on one of these things.

So, the question is, what do the other Republican senators think about that effort? And given the unpopularity of that kind of approach in a lot of the Intermountain West, where we have Republican senators in places like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and other places that understand how unpopular this is and how much risk it’s going to create, I don’t know if they do it or not.

Trump Is Freeing Up Public Lands for Big Oil. It Doesn’t Want Them by Kate Aronoff at The New Republic. There may be no metric Donald Trump is more obsessed with, and understands less about, than the price of oil. For its part, the oil industry has been unimpressed by the White House’s dramatic regulatory rollbacks and gifts of federal land, which haven’t managed to outweigh their hatred of Trump’s tariffs or his ironclad commitment to lower gas prices. (The general chaos emanating from Washington hasn’t helped win industry support, either.) The majority of U.S. oil is produced using costly extraction methods such as fracking, and drillers need relatively high oil prices to break even. This is a toxic combination: As oil has been getting cheaper, costs for essential inputs like steel have gone up. Broader uncertainty about the direction of the economy, partly fueled by tariffs, has made it difficult for companies to make longer-term planning decisions and court investors. Trump’s performative abolishment of protections for national monuments won’t fix any of these problems. The truth is that what the oil industry needs right now isn’t more land. It’s “prices high enough to make … drilling possible,” Rory Johnston, an oil market researcher, told me. “It wouldn’t matter if you doubled the availability of acres. If the prices aren’t there, they aren’t going to drill.”

A COP30 roadmap to inaction or ambition on climate finance? by Mariana Paoli and Iskander Erzini Venoit at Climate Home News. Initially, negotiators from the G77+China countries united behind Africa’s call for $1.3 trillion as the replacement for the $100-billion goal for annual mobilization of climate finance by developed countries for developing nations, set 15 years ago. Faithful to this, some G77 countries originally called for a roadmap to indicate actions that developed countries might take to raise public finance resources for this provision and mobilisation for the Global South. There were, however, those in the Global North who pushed for a broader, less well-defined $1.3 trillion target that would include other sources and types of finance. These forces ultimately won the day, resulting in a final decision on $1.3 trillion that calls for “all finance” from “all … sources”, establishing a “roadmap” process toward this. Exceedingly disappointing for the Global South, this new formulation obfuscates the responsibility of wealthy historical emitters to pay their fair share of public finance to tackle a problem they have caused and risks shifting the burden to developing countries.

Solar industry groups react to Senate Finance Committee draft bill by Anne Fischer at PV Magazine. Following release of the Senate Finance Committee’s draft text of the One Big Beautiful Bill, leaders of industry groups Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA) agree the the bill, as written, will halt the progress of an industry that has sparked a new American industrial revolution. The bill will “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA. SEIA estimates that announced investments in U.S. solar manufacturing now total $45.8 billion since the IRA was enacted in 2022. “Despite modest improvements on several provisions, this legislation does not go far enough to remove the threat to one of the greatest economic success stories in American history,” Hopper said. “This bill makes it harder to do business in America for U.S. manufacturers and small businesses and will undoubtedly lead us to an energy-strained economy with higher electric bills over the next five years.”

Are Pesticides Breeding the Next Pandemic? Experts Warn of Fungal Superbugs. In a recent commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine, two infectious disease experts at UC Davis — Dr. George Thompson and Dr. Angel Desai — are sounding the alarm about the rise of fungal infections. They warn that new agricultural pesticides designed to kill harmful fungi might be making it harder to treat dangerous fungal infections in people and animals.