With the Coal Industry Already in Decline, Rural Organizers Win Campaign to End Coal Leasing on Federal Land.
Powder River Basin Resource Council's Shannon Anderson speaks out on rural organizing, complementary legal strategies, and creating political cover for policy decisions that make a difference.
The Biden Administration announced an end to future coal leasing on federal land in the Powder River Basin earlier this month. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued the decision impacting northeast Wyoming and southern Montana, the nation’s largest coal producing region.
As previously reported in The Cocklebur, BLM released their final environmental impact statement related to two Powder River Basin resource management plans. The BLM selected the “no future coal leasing alternative,” finding that continuing the Powder River Basin coal leasing program would have significant impacts to public health, climate, and the environment. Existing mines will continue to operate and can develop already-leased coal resources, but expansion into further publicly-owned coal reserves will not be allowed.
The Cocklebur spoke with Shannon Anderson about the role of grassroots organizing and legal campaigns in rural places, and about lessons that can be learned from the coal leasing victory. Anderson is the Organizing Director and Staff Attorney of Powder River Basin Resource Council (PRBRC). PRBRC is a member organization of the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC), who also supported the coal lease termination decision. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Cocklebur: I wanted to talk because of what I see as an under-reported and under-appreciated victory for rural organizers. You (at Powder River Basin Resource Council) and your organizers and leaders have pulled off something historic. Tell me, is the BLM decision to end future coal leasing on federal land in the Powder River Basin as big of a deal as it seems?
Anderson: It’s sort of interesting. That's the big question because symbolically it’s a huge deal, a huge decision. But practically, it does very little on the ground to change things, so there is a disconnect there.
But certainly the decision is satisfying. Our organization and others have been engaged in a comprehensive grassroots campaign to end federal coal leasing in the Powder River Basin for over a decade now. The campaign stems back from the Obama years when they issued leases on 2 billion tons of coal for additional mining. That was the last huge rush on new federal coal in the Powder River Basin. President Obama was on the one hand saying, ‘I'm gonna be a climate leader’ and ‘we've got to start addressing environmental injustice,’ but on the other he is offering up billions of tons of coal leases. Coal has numerous air and water issues, of course, and the Obama Administration did focus a lot on the power plant side of coal. They did implement a new regulatory framework to address air and water pollution from the coal industry. But what they didn’t do is tackle the supply side of the coal problem.
The Cocklebur: Tell me more about that. Why is the Powder River Basin so important in addressing coal’s environmental problems?
Anderson: Most folks don't realize that the Powder River Basin--which is owned by you and me as American taxpayers--is the largest single source of climate change in this country. Because it is owned by the people as a federally-owned resource, we have complete control over it. This power in our ownership interest is really important to recognize here. There is a public interest obligation on the part of BLM and federal resource management, there is a public interest obligation by any President’s Administration. That’s part of the back story.
Back to the Obama years, Secretary Jewel [Sally Jewel, Obama’s Secretary of the Interior for his second term] comes in and she implements the secretarial order that puts a pause on new federal coal leasing, not just in the Powder River Basin but all across the Western U.S. Once that order started to move through the system, we began a programmatic environmental impact statement process. We showed up at hearings and meetings, meeting after meeting after meeting. We did all that work and then in comes Secretary Zinke (Secretary of Interior during the early Trump Presidency) and they roll back the order real fast. Then, we kind of had to sit and wait.
It was an interesting time because the Trump administration goes by and not a single ton of federal Powder River Basin coal was sold at an auction. This is another example of the symbolic versus the practical, in my opinion. There's nobody wanting additional coal right now from Powder Basin. Companies have way too much coal under lease already. They have reserves of plenty. That 2 billion tons leased in the Obama years, they still have that available and they continue mining it out. The BLM estimates that current leases in Wyoming will last until 2041. They've still got gobs of it so they practically the don't need anything new. The coal industry is in decline.
The Cocklebur: Right. And that’s a national decline based on markets. Coal is more expensive than other sources of energy now. And old coal plants that are less efficient and expensive due to maintenance costs are shutting down nationwide.
Anderson: Peak coal production here in the Powder River Basin was 2008. At that time, we were producing over 400 million tons of coal from Wyoming. Since then, we've declined by over half. There was a blip because 2019 was a really bad year and then we had COVID, an even worse year. Now we're back to around 2019 levels. Coal production is still declining, and this year has been a really bad year because of low natural gas prices.
Coal’s decline has happened because the energy world is in a very different place than it used to be. When I started working on this issue in 2007, coal was over half of our electricity mix nationwide. In March, coal’s share was around 15%. Renewables have even eclipsed coal during a couple of months this year. Burning coal for electricity is not the dominant need to feed our power grid any more.
Our Powder River Basin mines produce thermal coal that goes to power plants. That's what it does. We export the coal out of state on a train, so we are dependent on those distant energy markets. What happens when those power plants shut down, when you lose your customers? I go back to the importance of that ownership interest by the federal government. That ownership interest can really set guiding leadership and policy. But when it comes down it, when you think of the practical impacts, the stage for coal’s decline was set years ago.
The Cocklebur: You're both the PRBRC organizing director attorney, which I find interesting. Sometimes legal strategies can get in the way of organizing campaigns, but the legal side can also be a way to win (given resources and likely a longer timeline). In this case, the legal side of the campaign was critically important.
Anderson: Oh, it was really important.
I have to say that I was an organizer before I was a lawyer. A smart mentor of mine in law school told me that ‘your law degree,’ and the legal system in general, it's the wrench in a campaign plan. It’s never the hammer that puts in that last nail to give you victory. Legal action helps to twist and turn the campaign a little bit, applying pressure where possible.
We filed our original litigation, again, against the Obama administration. They were not willing to address Powder River Basin coal at the time, so we had to sue them. We coupled that legal action with organizing, outreach, and a media campaign that really highlighted the need to take action from an administrative perspective. That got us the secretarial order from Secretary Jewel. Then we spent the Trump years just kind of waiting it out. Now here we are in a new administration, and winning our second decision from the same judge telling the BLM, ‘hey, you still haven't done the homework that I gave you to do.’ What they didn’t do is to look at the climate change impacts of coal and to weigh out what it would mean to have a ‘no leasing’ alternative. Once BLM took a meaningful look, going through the environmental review process, we all weighed in again. Now we're back to the organizing and media communications campaign component.
The Cocklebur: What is the core of your argument?
Anderson: Well, we started with good analysis. We gave him [the judge] good information and citizen support from the Western U.S. Our approach is basically to say that as a public coal owner, this is something I care about and I want you to take action. That approach was important in winning this decision. It's a combination of things, legal included, but it’s also the power of grassroots organizing. You have a constituency in Wyoming and Montana that, as you might guess, are in the minority for the most part. They are still willing to stand up and speak out, showing up time after time and giving their opinions in public meetings in very hostile territory. That provides really important political cover to decision makers and gives them that freedom to be able to seize that leadership opportunity when it comes.
The Cocklebur: This is primarily a rural area. Coal’s decline surely has impacts, from job loss to local economic pressures to government revenue. What do you see in terms of transitioning the region toward a likely non-coal future?
Anderson: We’ve already seen those threats. There's been a clear decline. There’s been job loss and revenue loss already. You keep that in mind, and the industry is gonna over-react with this decision because they’re already coming from a place of vulnerability. That’s where the industry is right now. We get that, but at the same time, this decision is a decade in the making. We've had that long to come up with a transition plan as a state and we haven't done that. Some of our leaders just prefer to dig in and ‘save coal’ even though that's not a practical reaction to what's happening nationally with electricity markets.
As an organization, we've worked really hard on the coal side, the mining side, to make sure that mines are fully bonded, that mine reclamation actually happens, that lands get restored. That's been a really big part of our work on the ground, showing that reclamation jobs are good jobs as well that sustain jobs after the life of the mine. That’s an important piece of the legacy of our coal work. Beyond that, there's a great need for economic transition and diversification. And it is going to take leadership to make that happen when the opportunity comes along.
The Cocklebur covers rural policy and politics from a progressive point-of-view. Our work focuses on a tangled rural political reality of dishonest debate, economic and racial disparities, corporate power over our democracy, and disinformation peddled by conservative media outlets. We aim to use facts, data, and science to inform our point-of-view. We wear our complicated love/WTF relationship with rural America on our sleeve.