Plans by the Trump administration to open national forests and grasslands in Texas to new rounds of oil and gas drilling are renewing the debate over the role climate change should play in permitting energy projects and raising questions of whether the president’s admitted climate skepticism is skewing agency decisions that should be based on science.

Environmentalists are accusing the administration of committing another act of “climate censorship” after a U.S. Forest Service administrator allegedly directed agency employees to remove references to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions from proposals to open national forests and grasslands in Texas to new rounds of oil and natural gas drilling.

The agency, which is seeking to end an Obama-era moratorium on new drilling on those lands, denies the allegations. The Trump administration proposes to lease large areas of Sam Houston National Forest, Davy Crockett National Forest, Angelina National Forest, Sabine National Forest, Caddo National Grasslands and LBJ National Grasslands to oil and natural gas companies. The forests and grasslands cover parts of Haynesvlle shale in East Texas and the Barnett shale in North Texas, where companies have drilled oil and gas wells for decades.

Environmentalists contend that a draft notice seeking public comment on the proposal mentioned the need “to address new greenhouse gas science and climate trends in the analysis and management direction.” That notice, which was posted by the U.S. Forest Service to a federal website on Aug. 26, was replaced the next day with a version without references to greenhouse gases and climate change.

An email, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Center for Biological Diversity described an unnamed deputy director ordering agency employees to remove all references to climate change and greenhouse gases from the notice.

“The deputy who is reviewing the (notice of intent) requested every reference to ‘climate’ and ‘greenhouse gases’ be removed,” a Forest Service employee helping to prepare the notice wrote in the email.

The Center for Biological Diversity, based in Tuscon, Ariz., interpreted that sentence as agency administrators trying to steer discussions surrounding the proposed drilling away from the climate change debate.

“This is another example of climate censorship that we’ve been seeing as a pattern under the Trump administration,” said Taylor McKinnon, senior lands campaigner for the environmental advocacy group.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Trump administration plans to open national forests in Texas to more oil and gas drilling

Misharacterized

Agency officials said the email cited by environmentalists as proof of so-called censorship mischaracterized the request made by the deputy director who reviewed the notice. The email, a spokesperson said, was only seeking to have the notice edited for clarity and brevity, not to make it conform with any policies associated with oil and gas development or climate.

“Numerous other editorial changes not related to greenhouse gasses or climate were also made between the draft and final notices for clarity and brevity,” the spokesperson said.

But suspicions that federal agencies are downplaying or burying climate concerns have been fueled by a president who has called climate change a hoax and dismissed a 2018 report — by his own administration — that reached dire conclusions that accelerating climate change would result in more wildfires, flooding and other catastrophes.

The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York has documented at least 184 incidents in which the Trump administration has taken out references to climate change from government websites or publications. The law school’s “Climate Deregulation Tracker” identified another 133 incidents in which he administration scaled back or eliminated federal regulations and efforts to combat climate change. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group headquartered in New York, has found similar results in its tracking.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen repeated attempts across the system to eliminate consideration of climate change,” said Bobby McEnaney, a senior deputy director with the National Resources Defense Council.

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How to — and whether — to account for climate change in environmental regulation remains a controversial issue. Earlier this month, the administration proposed revamping the National Environmental Policy Act to relieve federal agencies from considering climate change while reviewing the environmental impact of energy, highway and other projects— a proposal strongly condemned by environmentalists.

Last year, a dispute over how to account for climate change at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which was then split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, delayed decisions on liquefied natural gas projects along the Gulf Coast. Commissioners reached a compromise to detail greenhouse gas emissions from the projects, but stopped short of determining whether those emissions would contribute to global warming.

Now, the Sierra Club and several other opponents are challenging FERC’s approval last year of three proposed liquefied natural gas export terminals at the Port of Brownsville, arguing, in part, that the commission failed to consider the terminals’ combined impact on climate change.

Traditionally, regulators have reviewed projects individually, focusing on the local impact on the environment and public health. But bringing climate change into the mix requires regulators to take a global outlook and consider the cumulative impact of oil and gas projects on greenhouse gas emissions, said Daniel Cohan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.

“Climate change is the single greatest environmental challenge that we face at this time, so it should be considered in any environmental assessments that are used to prepare permits,” Cohan said. “However, climate impacts are a tricky thing to assess, because an individual project will have only a negligible impact globally, so projects need to be looked at on aggregate basis to gauge their impacts.”

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As part of its overall efforts to boost domestic oil and gas production and exports, the Trump administration wants to reopen the lands for drilling. If approved, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that 1,500 new wells on the lands would produce more than 68 million barrels of oil and more than 4.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over a 20-year period.

Requiring more than 5 billion gallons of water for drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations, the wells also would produce more than 32 billion gallons of wastewater that would need to be recycled or injected underground at facilities known as saltwater disposal sites.

During upcoming public comment periods, opponents of the East Texas drilling projects plan to raise concerns about the effects on water and the habitat for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, and the potential to cause earthquakes.

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Oil and gas industry advocates argue that the federally managed forests and grasslands in Texas already have oil and natural gas activity, including horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which they contend is safe and regulated.

“Data from federal agencies tell a clear story — we are producing more oil and gas than ever before while keeping greenhouse gas emissions in check,” Texans for Natural Gas spokeswoman Elizabeth Caldwell said. “Efforts like this by the Center for Biological Diversity demonstrate that environmental activists are making a last ditch attempt to distract the public from that data, simply because it tells a story they don’t like.”

Environmentalists say they remain puzzled by the hard-line ideological stance on climate change taken by the Trump administration, noting that more than 200 projects that acknowledged climate change were ultimately approved by the Obama administration from 2014 to 2016.

The Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations and retreat from policies aimed at slowing the rapid advance of climate change could provide benefits and boost profits to the oil and gas industry in the short term, said Cohan, the Rice professor. But in the longer term, he added, the actions applauded today by the industry might erode its position as addressing climate change gains urgency.

“All this nihilism and wiping away of regulations is going to make it harder for the oil and gas industry to have a seat at the table when the issue gets taken more seriously,” Cohan said.

This story has been updated and expanded.

sergio.chapa@chron.com

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