Public Lands May Be America’s Best Climate Defense

Public lands protect forests that help store atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions while providing space for renewable energy development and protecting wildlife habitat and biodiversity, helping plants and animals adapt to climate change, said Kit Muller, coordinator for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) landscape initiatives in Washington, D.C.  “Those are the three big things, I think.”
...
Add up all the national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and other lands, and the public estate totals more than 609 million acres, or roughly 27 percent of the land area of the U.S. — enough land nearly equal to the land mass of California, Texas and Alaska combined. ...

But as scientists gain a greater understanding of the role public lands play in helping to mitigate climate change, the future of those lands is less and less certain as the federal government’s ability to manage those lands is threatened or weakened by champions of state control and opponents of federal regulation.  At the same time, climate change itself threatens the ecological balance of those lands.
...
Antipathy toward the federal government in parts of the West and the scale of its control of land and natural resources there has sparked a long-simmering backlash in some states, where federal park rangers and other land managers sometimes face the possibility of violence for being representatives of the federal government.

That antipathy is the driving force behind a movement in Utah, Montana, Nevada and other Western states seeking to force the federal government to cede public lands to the states as a way to use many of them for mining and fossil fuels extraction.
...
A study mandated by the Utah Legislature and published last November by Utah’s three largest universities concluded that the only way for the state to afford the cost of managing that land would be to drill it for oil and gas, and mine it for coal.  A resolution declaring that oil and gas development is the “highest and best use” of many of the state’s most sensitive public lands is quickly passing through the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature.

“I think the transfer of the (public) lands wouldn’t just encourage, it would almost require more serious resource extraction,” Nick Lawton, a staff attorney at the Green Energy Institute at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., said.  “From a climate point of view, the best thing to do with fossil fuel resources still in the ground is to leave them in the ground.

“If you’re talking about taking back national forests, then, yeah, you could see increased rates of logging and reduction of valuable carbon sinks,” he said.

Read more at Public Lands May Be America’s Best Climate Defense