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Trump Interior nominee would review Obama's limits on oil drilling

18 January 2017 00:27 (UTC +04:00)

President-elect Donald Trump's pick to run the Department of the Interior, Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, said on Tuesday he would consider scrapping some of President Barack Obama’s environment initiatives if confirmed, including reviewing curbs on oil drilling on federal lands, APA reports quoting Reuters.

"Yes," he said in response to a question from Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska during his confirmation hearing about whether he would review drilling curbs imposed by Obama's administration in her state.

"The president-elect has said that we want to be energy independent. I can guarantee you it is better to produce energy domestically under reasonable regulation than overseas with no regulation," he said. "We need an economy."

The Interior Department oversees territories covering a fifth of the United States' surface from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, including sensitive wildlife habitats, iconic landscapes, rich deposits of oil, gas and coal and important pasturelands for ranchers.

Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander and an avid hunter and angler, emerged as a surprise pick to head the department in part because he has embraced federal stewardship of national parks, forests and refuges. This diverges from the Republican Party's official position to sell off acreage to states that might prioritize development.

But as a congressman he has also fought for increased energy development on federal lands, a position that has worried conservationists and which fits neatly with Trump's vows to bolster the U.S. energy sector by scaling back regulation and opening up more publicly held land.

Over the last eight years, the Interior Department has sought to limit industry access to federal lands and played a key role in Obama's agenda to combat climate change, as it proposed rules aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions from energy production on federal land.

Obama's Interior Department banned new coal mining leases on federal property early in 2016. More recently the agency placed parts of the offshore Arctic and Atlantic off-limits to drilling and declared national monuments that protect large parts of Utah and Nevada from development.

Zinke said he believed Trump could "amend" Obama's moves to declare millions of acres of federal property as national monuments. But he said that any move Trump made to rescind a designation would immediately be challenged.

He did not comment directly on whether he would seek to reverse Obama's federal coal-lease ban, but said he believed coal plays an important part in the U.S. energy mix.