POLICY BRIEF: American Energy Blueprint - Highlighted Article

From: IER

Date: January, 2025

POLICY BRIEF: American Energy Blueprint

Summary

The American Energy Blueprint is a comprehensive set of policy recommendations to guide the new Trump administration's approach to energy policy. The Blueprint outlines key reforms in areas such as federal land and water use, expanding consumer choice, reducing subsidies, curbing government spending and taxation, streamlining regulations, and modernizing the permitting process.

Federal Lands and Waters

The Biden administration launched an unprecedented attack on energy development on federal lands. From restricting land use to slowing or halting permitting approvals and raising fees, the administration did seemingly everything to make energy development on federal lands more difficult and more expensive as part of its pledge to “end fossil fuels.” The Trump administration should take swift action to reverse these actions and Congress should update statutes to ensure such abuse cannot happen again in the future.

Administrative Actions:

• Reverse restrictive Biden actions in ANWR and NPR-A, and revoke other Alaska land-use limitations on energy and minerals. Alaska is over twice the size of Texas; two-thirds of it is federally owned and 86% of it is inaccessible by road.
• Reverse the illegal denial of an access road to Alaska’s Ambler Mining District, one of the U.S.’s most potentially prolific sources of valuable rare earth minerals.
• The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management should proceed with Lease Sale 262 in 2025, as planned, and create a new, more comprehensive Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) five-year leasing program, including at least two lease sales per year in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). With the current OCS five-year leasing program under litigation, the administration should request a voluntary remand to resolve all pending petitions.
• Release a new offshore leasing plan.
• Approve permits for new mines.
• Executive order to reconsider all Biden administration decisions on land withdrawals from energy or mining leasing.
• Reverse the Biden actions requiring higher fees and costs for production in certain areas.
• Review, reverse, and shrink Biden and Obama-era national monument designations. (continue reading)

POLICY BRIEF: American Energy Blueprint