Dems fume as committee approves Republican wildlife bill

The House Natural Resources Committee passed several other energy bills Tuesday.

The House Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday cleared a GOP-only wildlife conservation bill along party lines 21-17, over fierce objections from Democrats who derided the measure as a sham.

H.R. 7408, the "America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act," from Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), is a Republican alternative challenging the bipartisan “Recovering America’s Wildlife Act," which has been in the mix for years but failed to become law.

While the two bills share the goal of protecting wildlife habitat by providing grants to state conservation agencies, they sharply diverge in approach.

Westerman’s bill would authorize an annual appropriation of $300 million that sunsets in five years. "RAWA" would provide more than $1.3 billion in permanent funding.

The bipartisan bill has “innovative ways to give [state agencies] real funding that’s far and above the permanent mandatory funding that passed the House last Congress,” Westerman said. “But it didn’t pass a Democratic-controlled Senate and it didn’t get signed into law by a Democrat president, so to me, that tells me there’s a dead end on the previous approach.”

Democrats, led by California Rep. Jared Huffman, slammed Westerman's bill for making grants available through the appropriations process rather than permanent funding. Huffman derided the GOP funding move as “Bruce bucks” and “monopoly money” that may never actually get appropriated.

"It's the status quo on Ozempic," Huffman said, referring to the popular weight-loss drug made by Novo Nordisk.

Republicans have "taken ['RAWA'] and hijacked it and turned it on its head, and shame on team extreme for doing that. … We’ve gone from the gold standard, 'RAWA,' to this poor excuse of a wildlife conservation bill," Huffman said.

Aside from funding, Democrats and environmental groups take issue with provisions that they say would weaken the Endangered Species Act. The bill would make several tweaks to the law, like allowing states to develop their own recovery strategies for species listed as threatened or are candidates to be listed.

A Huffman amendment would have stripped out the bill’s ESA language, calling it a “recipe for extinction for many at-risk species.” The amendment failed.

Westerman replied that his bill makes “much-needed reforms to the Endangered Species Act to address the program’s wildly unsuccessful 3 percent recovery rate.”

The GOP bill also includes language rescinding nearly $1 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. Some $30 million of that IRA money is currently directed toward the offices responsible for environmental permitting.

Democrats are staunchly defensive of their marquee climate bill. Huffman introduced an amendment to strip the permitting rescissions and said it was helping with project approvals. The amendment failed.

That didn't sit well with Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who said further funding agency permitting would do nothing to speed up the process.

"I’m dumbfounded that somebody thinks that it makes more sense to add a billion dollars to bureaucrats doing environmental reviews than it is to actually improve the efficiency of the regulatory process,” Graves said.

Prominent environmental groups slammed the bill before Tuesday’s markup.

“Chair Westerman and extreme House Republicans are again waging war on wildlife by cutting funding and deliberately hamstringing the Endangered Species Act,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the left-leaning Center for Biological Diversity.

“This insidious bill is completely out of touch with the American public, who care deeply about saving our most imperiled animals and plants and want to see more funding, not less.”

The latest version of the "Recovering America's Wildlife Act," S. 1149, was introduced in 2023 by Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) has promised to introduce a companion.

Geothermal bills

The full committee also approved four bills related to geothermal energy exploration, production and permitting. Two of them drew strong criticism from committee Democrats.

The biggest pushback centered on H.R. 7409, from Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.). The “Harnessing Energy at Thermal Sources (HEATS) Act" would exempt geothermal exploration or production operators on nonfederal surface lands from having to obtain a federal drilling permit if the government owns less than half "of the subsurface mineral estate at issue."

Project operators would still be subject to state permitting regulations. But Huffman said the bill “is not in line with responsible development, and that’s why I must unfortunately oppose it."

He took issue with the provision waiving a federal permit for projects where less than half the subsurface mineral estate is federally owned, noting that doing so "goes entirely too far and undermines communities on the ground that could actually be impacted [by] some aspects of a project."

Huffman argued that the threshold of less than 50 percent of the federal mineral estate “could still be huge." He said that "50 percent of 2,000 acres is still 1,000 acres."

The Democrat added, “This is a classic case of my friends across the aisle doing what they call permitting reform in a way that just doesn’t cut it; that once again is just hostile to public input and public review.”

Westerman replied that he supports the “commonsense bill that will expedite the development of geothermal energy on nonfederal lands containing federal minerals.”

He also emphasized that projects would still have to go “through a rigorous state permitting process but would not be bogged down by the duplicative and burdensome federal process.”

The bill passed 22-16, mostly along party lines. Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska was the lone Democrat to vote in favor of the bill.

The committee also approved H.R. 6482, sponsored by Rep. Russ Fulcher (R-Idaho). Democrats objected but allowed the bill to pass by voice vote.

Fulcher’s bill would require the Interior secretary, in consultation with the Energy secretary, to designate certain federal lands “as geothermal leasing priority areas as soon as practicable, but not later than 5 years, after the date of enactment.”

For areas that qualify, and have already been subject to an environmental analysis, the Interior secretary would be prohibited from requiring additional review.

Fulcher said there are too many regulatory and permitting barriers to geothermal power development and that his bill “would provide an exemption for that.”

Huffman said he mostly supported “the intention of where Mr. Fulcher wants to go” with the bill but argued that “geothermal projects need to be held to high standards, especially on our public lands,” and that more federal oversight is needed, not less, to ensure they are being developed properly.

Westerman disagreed, saying Congress must do “all that we can to ensure that bureaucratic red tape does not hamper geothermal energy in the future.”

Oil and gas fees

Another contentious bill that drew strong Democratic opposition was H.R. 7375, from Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), to address fees oil and gas developers pay to nominate federal lands for lease.

The IRA included a provision for so-called expression of interest fees charged to companies that nominate a federal parcel for lease, regardless of whether they submit the winning bid at auction. Hageman’s bill would require that only the winning bidder pay the $5-per-acre fee.

Critics, including the Bureau of Land Management, have opposed the bill, saying it would “roll back” some of the IRA’s key oil and gas leasing reforms, including those incentivizing oil and gas companies to more carefully review the availability of lands for leasing before they submit expressions of interest that tie up the use of the lands until a leasing decision is made.

"That’s small potatoes," Huffman said of the $5-per-acre fee.

“It’s not breaking any banks, but it does ensure that there’s a genuine interest in developing the land rather than exploiting loopholes,” he added.

"The BLM is already seeing the effectiveness of this reform. It’s working. It is curbing frivolous and speculative leasing activities," Huffman said. "But to no one’s surprise, my friends across the aisle are here to try to take away even this modest fee that benefits their big oil and fossil fuel overlords.”

But Hageman said the fee is paid by the developer, even if the parcel is never offered for lease, meaning they are paying for services BLM does not provide.

Westerman added, “H.R. 7375 is a crucial step toward easing unnecessary burdens on domestic energy production and allowing us to fully capitalize on our abundant energy resources.”

The committee voted to approve the bill 22-16 along party lines, with Peltola the only Democrat to vote yes.

Other bills

By:  GARRETT DOWNS, SCOTT STREATER

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