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“You have to bring this back to DC and rebuild it,” said Joel Clement, a former Home Office expert on climate change policy who resigned from the agency in protest against the policies of the Trump administration. “The staff, the budget – all these people who were supposed to work with Congress on these policies were kicked out of the West, or they left,” he said. “They are extremely demoralized.”
Ms Haaland is also expected to reconsider the removal of habitat protection by the Trump administration under the Endangered Species Act. Under Trump rules, it became easier to remove a species from the endangered species list, and for the first time, regulators were allowed to conduct economic assessments – for example, estimate lost revenue due to a ban on logging in critical habitat – when deciding whether a species deserves protection.
Such rules have led to an exodus of staff, especially from the Fish and Wildlife Service, said Clement.
“There is a reconstruction that has to happen there,” he said.
The Home Office is also due to submit a new detailed plan by June 2022 that explains how the federal government will manage the vast outer continental shelf off the US coast, an area rich in marine wildlands and oil and gas resources. underwater.
Given Mr. Biden’s promise to ban new drilling, the new offshore management plan will most likely re-impose Obama-era policies that banned oil exploration on all of the eastern and western coasts of the United States. United – while perhaps going further, limiting offshore drilling. of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. But writing the legal, economic and scientific justifications will be difficult.
“They have to go ahead and really crack it,” said Jacqueline Savitz, vice president of Oceana, an environmental group.
As the ministry opposes offshore drilling, it is expected to help ramp up offshore wind farms. Last week, the agency took an important step towards approving the first large-scale offshore wind farm of the country, near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, a project that has been going on for years.
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