Center for Western Priorities
Public lands for a cleaner, greener future
Jesse Prentice-Dunn and Tyler McIntosh
Executive Summary
The Center for Western Priorities (CWP) seeks a talented MENV team to help us
advocate for responsible deployment of renewable energy on public lands in
order to help combat the climate crisis. Research from the U.S. Geological
Survey has found that fossil fuels extracted from federal public lands and waters
are the source of nearly 25% of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions,
meaning that those lands would rank fifth in the world for emissions if they were
their own country. However, as of 2019, federal public lands only supplied 5% of
the country’s utility-scale solar and wind energy. There is an immense
opportunity for public lands to become part of the climate solution, rather than
contributing to the problem.
A transition from fossil fuel development to renewable energy generation on
public lands is a highly-leveraged emissions reduction mechanism. However, it is
complicated by shifts in policy between different administrations, energy
transmission and conservation constraints, competing land uses, and budgetary
concerns on both the state and federal level.
The selected team of graduate students will work collaboratively with CWP, state
and federal agencies, renewable energy companies, private companies, and
other environmental nonprofits to examine the current state of policies and
regulations that enable renewable deployment, quantify what is happening now,
and make specific and actionable recommendations to reform the system to
incentivize the deployment of renewables while retaining key revenue for
taxpayers.