DENVER — More access to the outdoors, limiting regulatory oversight and taking power away from the president.
On the surface, those sound like policies anyone could get behind, but the details behind those bullet points reveal the environmental policies another Donald Trump presidency could bring.
Each day this week, Next with Kyle Clark will take an in-depth look at how America’s choice for president will impact Colorado.
Environmental policy
The outdoors is an escape. Scenery, recreation, and perhaps, the subtle sound of drill baby drill.
"Nobody has more liquid gold under their feet than the United States of America, and we will use it and profit by it,” Trump said in a video on his Agenda 47 campaign website.
Utilizing federal public lands for energy independence was the focus of the Department of Interior section of Project 2025, a collection of conservative policies that are being recommended for Trump to follow if re-elected.
Former Bureau of Land Management Acting Director William Perry Pendley wrote the Department of Interior section.
“I think the primary focus of my chapter was on the energy component,” Pendley said. “My suggestion is that President Trump, when he comes in, is do what he did when he was there the first time, which is to aggressively issue oil and gas leases.”
Pendley is also outspoken about wanting to do away with the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to designate national monuments like President Obama did with Browns Canyon in 2015 and President Biden did with Camp Hale in 2022.
“I don't think there's any question that President Biden's abuse of the Antiquities Act to create more national monuments in the west over the objection of rural westerners is going to be an issue for President Trump coming in,” Pendley said. “They ought to be created by acts of Congress because it ensures bipartisanship and ensures that all the people have a place at the table.”
His suggestions to Trump included more access to public lands.
“The Biden administration has totally redefined the word ‘conservation,"' Pendley said. "These lands are multiple-use lands. They're supposed to be used for recreation and all sorts of activities, and President Biden and his team have closed lands to everybody, not just oil and gas operations, but the logging and the mining and the ranching and the stock raising and to off-road vehicle activity and recreation."
“Just opening up public lands to every form of recreation, and Mr. Pendley may be leaning towards motorized recreation, that is going to have the most impact on public lands habitat,” David Lien, a Colorado hunter-conservationist, said.
As a hunter, Lien is concerned about the elk herds in Colorado.
“With the growing outdoor recreation community here in Colorado, we're seeing more and more impacts on public lands, so that means we have to manage those public lands and our access to them in a smart, deliberate way,” Lien said.
With more access, particularly to motorized vehicles, Lien said there would be disruption to recreation.
“If you're a hunter, having motorized vehicles or ATVs running through the middle of the National Monument, disrupting the big game habitat that's there, or if you're a hiker or backpacker or anyone else who isn't on a motorized vehicle, you're going to potentially be impacted by that access,” Lien said. “If anything, we need to protect more habitat in order to help us manage all of those potential impacts better."
Other environmental changes could target the Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump has previously said he wants to get rid of in almost every form. Last week, Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert called for the EPA budget to be cut to zero.
“I’m concerned about the Clean Air Act," Ean Thomas Tafoya, a Denver-area environmental justice leader, said. "I’m concerned about the Clean Water Act. I’m concerned about soil regulations, and even public lands are likely to be under attack.”
Tafoya was concerned about what would happen to historically marginalized communities if Trump followed through and canceled clean energy programs that move industries away from fossil fuels.
“If that gets scrapped and clawed back, and those investments are taken away, the city of Commerce City, Adams County, north Denver isn't going to have the resources they need to upgrade the windows for communities, to make sure that all of those trucks that are basically coming out of an inland port in north Denver won't electrify, it'll just be continuing to be more fossil fuel infrastructure,” Tafoya said. “All this idea of deregulation and shortening the window will just allow large projects to harm communities.”
Project 2025 also calls out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS).
The paper calls them both “the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Under the proposal, the NWS would stop providing forecasts except for what could be commercialized and sold.
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