This Week at Interior September 20, 2024

Transcript:

Hi, there. This is Rem Hawse, we are here with the Bureau of Land Management in the Arizona state office in Phoenix, Arizona, and you’re watching This Week at Interior!

This Week, at Interior

Secretary Haaland and National Park Service Director Chuck Sams traveled to Marfa, Texas this week to celebrate the designation of Blackwell School National Historic Site, and kick off National Hispanic Heritage Month. Built in 1909, the school serves as a significant example of how racism and cultural disparity dominated education and social systems in the United States during a period of de facto segregation from 1889 to 1965.

Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this week announced that an offshore wind energy lease sale will be held next month for eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. This is a first for the region. If fully developed, these areas have the potential to generate approximately 13 gigawatts of clean offshore wind energy, which could power more than 4.5 million homes.  

Interior this week announced nearly $1.3 million in awards to strengthen local governments’ wildfire response by converting vehicles to wildland fire engines. The Slip-on Tanker Pilot Program will help small, remote emergency response agencies quickly expand their wildfire response capacity as they continue to face the devastating impacts of climate change, drought and intensifying wildfires.    

The Bureau of Land Management this week announced an additional $3.25 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding to support Interior’s Gravel to Gravel Keystone Initiative. That will improve ecosystem health and Pacific salmon resiliency in the Yukon, Kuskokwim and Norton Sound regions in Alaska. The Department’s initiative is relying on Indigenous Knowledge and the best available science to inform plans for collective action to support resilient ecosystems and communities in the region and make immediate investments to respond to the salmon crisis.

The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement this week announced more than $4.8 million from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda for Maryland to address dangerous and polluting abandoned mine lands. This helps create good-paying, family-sustaining jobs, and will catalyze economic opportunity. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides a total of $16 billion to address legacy pollution, including $11.3 billion in AML funding over 15 years.

The Bureau of Land Management this week released a final environmental impact statement for the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Mine Project in Nevada. The proposed mine holds enough lithium to supply nearly 370,000 electric vehicles each year, and represents another step by the Biden-Harris administration to support a responsible domestic supply of critical minerals to power the clean energy economy.

Landslides are a damaging, disruptive and potentially deadly geologic hazard that occur across the United States. Now the U.S. Geological Survey has released a new interactive national landslide susceptibility map, showing where landslides are more or less likely to occur. These maps are useful for land-use planning and reducing risks in many areas in the U.S. where landslides are a major concern.

Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz and the National Park Service marked the completion of the National World War One Memorial in Washington, DC with an illumination of the memorial's centerpiece sculpture, "A Soldier's Journey" this week. The bronze sculptural wall is nearly 60-feet long and took years to complete -- it displays the journey of a soldier from enlistment to combat to homecoming. More than four and a half million Americans served in the First World War between 1917 and 1918.

And our social media Picture of the Week, the Dena'ina people of Alaska call it “Yaghanen," or the good land. It's also known as Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. From its ice fields and glaciers to its tundra, forests and coastal wetlands, the Kenai Refuge is often called “Alaska in miniature."

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That's This Week at Interior! 
 

This Week: Secretary Haaland travels to Marfa, Texas, to celebrate the designation of Blackwell School National Historic Site, and kick off National Hispanic Heritage Month; the first-ever offshore wind energy lease sale is announced in the Gulf of Maine; Interior announces nearly $1.3 million to help strengthen local governments’ wildfire response by converting vehicles to wildland fire engines; $3.25 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding will improve ecosystem health and Pacific salmon resiliency in Alaska; OSMRE announces more than $4.8 million to address dangerous and polluting abandoned mine lands in Maryland; BLM announces another step forward for a proposed critical mineral mine in Nevada; USGS releases a new interactive map that displays the risks of landslides across the country; the National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC is now complete; and we head north for our social media Picture of the Week! 

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    04/11/2025

    This Week at Interior April 11, 2025

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    This Week at Interior

    President Trump this week signed Executive Orders aimed at achieving the Administration's goal of American Energy Dominance with a renewed focus on coal. One of the orders directs Interior to identify untapped coal resources on federal lands, while removing barriers to mining and leasing.

    The value of untapped coal in our country is one hundred times greater than the value of all the gold at Fort Knox, and we're going to unleash it and make America rich and powerful again.

    To advance the President Trump's order, Interior will implement a series of policy moves and regulatory reforms to position coal as a cornerstone of the nation’s energy strategy by ensuring federally managed lands remain open and accessible for responsible energy development. Secretary Burgum likened the actions to creating a new Golden Age of "Mine, Baby, Mine," saying that  

    Interior is unlocking America’s full potential in energy dominance and economic development to make life more affordable for every American family while showing the world the power of America’s natural resources and innovation.  

    Among the actions are ending the moratorium on federal coal leasing, reopening federal lands in Montana and Wyoming to coal leasing, removing regulatory burdens for coal mines, and providing royalty rate relief.  

    Interior this week announced the disbursement of more than $13 million in grants to support the reclamation of abandoned mine lands, furthering the Trump administration’s commitment to American Energy Dominance, environmental stewardship and economic renewal in coal communities. The funding is administered through the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and it will support job creation and economic revitalization efforts in North Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.  

    Interior this week announced the release of updated oil and gas reserve estimates for the Gulf of America's Outer Continental Shelf. The new data and analysis over the last couple of years reveal an additional 1.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent since 2021, bringing the total reserve estimate to 7.04 billion barrels of oil equivalent. That figure includes 5.77 billion barrels of oil and 7.15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced plans to significantly increase oil and gas leasing on the Outer Continental Shelf, and just last week Secretary Burgum directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to hold the first Gulf of America oil and gas lease sale since its renaming in February.

    Secretary Burgum held his first All Hands meeting this week at Interior's historic Yates Auditorium. The Secretary saluted the notable accomplishments the Department has achieved in making the transition from the previous administration, and expanded on his vision that innovation, rather than regulation, is the cornerstone of American prosperity.

    The thing that has led our country for 250 years is innovation, doesn't matter whether it's the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution our ability to innovate in a way that allowed us to win World War One and World War II and lead the world and become the world leader, all of it was innovation based, and we have to get back to those roots. That's how we win. That's how America wins in this world, that's how we win again for our children and our children's children, is we win with innovation.

    U.S. Geological Survey crews were deployed late last week and this week to monitor flood impacts after storms dumped heavy rain across portions of the southeast and Midwest. Crews are still hard at work gathering flood measurements in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois and Ohio, as well as West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi, where as much as ten inches of rain fell causing massive flooding. The gages provide information for the National Weather Service to predict when dangerous flooding might occur and allow for warnings to vulnerable residents, as flood crests will continue into early May.

    And our social media Picture of the Week, California's Battery Point Lighthouse. Perched on California's rugged northern coast, this historic beacon stands among the rocky outcrops of the California Coastal National Monument and has guided mariners since its first lighting in 1856.

    Make sure you follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X! That's This Week at Interior!


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    News and headlines from Interior April 11, 2025

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