This discussion draft is a perfect distillation of Republican public lands energy policy: the only value of public lands and waters is the amount of fossil fuels that corporations can extract from them.
Title I would allow states to take over all oil and gas leasing, permitting, production, and regulation on most public lands within their boundaries, and exempts these activities from bedrock environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA).
The most outrageous proposal is in Title II, which would allow the federal government to extort enormous sums of money from coastal states that want to protect their oceans and beaches from the threat of offshore drilling.
