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Fair Share Scorecard: Ensuring Taxpayers Receive a Fair Share for America’s Public Resources
Developed in collaboration with the Center for American Progress, this scorecard evaluates the return Americans receive for publicly owned natural resources, including oil, gas, coal, hardrock minerals, and renewable resources. Additionally, this scorecard assesses the accessibility of publicly available information on extraction and payment processes for each natural resource, the external costs that could burden taxpayers from each resource, and steps currently being taken to ensure that taxpayers receive a fair share.
Read MoreA Fair Share: The Case for Updating Oil and Gas Royalty Rates on Our Public Lands
Stagnant federal royalty rates are depriving states and communities of urgently needed revenue. This report highlights how Western state taxpayers lose between $490 million and $730 million annually due to low royalty rates for oil and gas extracted from U.S. public lands. The analysis is an update to a previous report from 2013, “A Fair Share.”
Read MoreThe Golden Rush: How Public Lands Draw Retirees and Create Economic Growth
This report examines census data, migration trends, economic indicators, and the distribution of protected public lands to help determine which factors drive retirees to the West. It finds that seniors are three times more likely to move into Western counties with a higher percentage of protected public lands like national parks, monuments, and other conservation areas.
Read MoreEconomic Impacts of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument
An economic analysis examines the economic impact of the Upper Missouri River Breaks, a national monument in Montana. The study estimates that the monument has a total economic impact of about $10 million per year, including direct and secondary impacts, and an average of about 139,000 visitors per year between 2001 and 2013. This significant source of tourism revenue has the potential to be much greater.
Read MoreA Progress Report on Secretary Jewell’s Agenda for Balance
This report outlines how far the agency has come after one year under Secretary Jewell’s leadership on her five core conservation goals. This follows on a previous report – “Secretary Jewell’s Year of Action: Her Predecessors and a Path Forward in 2014”
Read MoreA Renters Market: Outdated Oil and Gas Rental Rates Fail Taxpayers
“A Renter’s Market” finds that American taxpayers are not receiving a fair return from the oil and natural gas boom on federal public lands. The report highlights the Bureau of Land Management’s badly outdated rental system in which oil and gas companies pay only $1.50 per acre annually—less than a cup of coffee—to rent federal public lands for drilling. CWP finds that updating oil and gas rental rates, something that has not been done since 1987, could generate an additional $56 million annually for taxpayers.
Read MoreLanguishing Lands: Conservation Bills Stalled in Congress
Part of the Center for Western Priorities’ Equal Ground campaign, “Languishing Lands” examines the legislative history of 10 high-profile land conservation bills introduced by lawmakers from each party. The report finds that legislation to protect these deserving places has been introduced a combined 52 times over the last 30 years. Yet, Congress protected only a single new wilderness area in five years as of 2014–the longest conservation drought since World War II.
Read MoreSecretary Jewell’s Year of Action: Her Predecessors and a Path Forward
This 2014 report examines the policy accomplishments of recent Interior Secretaries and suggests how Secretary Sally Jewell can achieve a conservation legacy. It comes in the wake of President Obama’s State of the Union address, in which he made new commitments to protect our air, water and communities and conserve pristine public lands.
Read MoreLandlocked: Measuring Public Land Access in the West
More than four million acres of public lands in the West—roughly the size of New Jersey—are inaccessible to the public as a result of land ownership patterns, absent entry points, and a failure to remove barriers to entry, according to CWP’s first-of-its-kind “Landlocked” report. These shuttered lands reduce opportunities for outdoor recreation in Western states, and stymie nearby communities from reaping the employment opportunities and economic benefits these lands provide.
Read MoreA Fair Share: The Case for Updating Federal Royalties
Stagnant federal royalty rates are depriving states and communities of urgently needed revenue. This analysis found that the federal government is undercharging oil and gas companies compared to western energy-producing states that have kept pace with evolving conditions. The antiquated federal rates further stress municipal and state budgets and squeeze communities ill-equipped to handle the strain of industrial drilling.
Read MoreFollow the Oil
Economic realities and the location of untapped energy sources are the driving causes behind oil and gas companies’ transition from public to private land. This in-depth analysis and mapping project found the combination of historically low natural gas prices, near record oil prices, and vast shale oil deposits under private lands make drilling and fracking for oil more profitable for oil and gas companies. And most of that oil happens to be on private land.
Read MoreRebuilding A Conservation Legacy: Opportunities for the President and Congress to Preserve Western Lands
The failed efforts of the 112th Congress to protect a single acre of land provided a roadmap of opportunities for the 113th Congress, and the White House, to establish a bipartisan conservation legacy. In this reprt, the Center for Western Priorities reviewed more than 50 Republican and Democratic proposals introduced in the 112th Congress that would have permanently protected land. The report identified 14 opportunities in states across the West for the Administration and Congress to re-establish a strong legacy of land conservation, and to catch up with the conservation efforts of prior administrations.
Read MoreRight Way and Wrong Way to Lease Public Land
CWP’s side-by-side examples of oil and gas drilling projects offer a point-by-point analysis of how one reflects smart planning and the other is wrongheaded.
Read MoreClose to Home: Communities and Families Cope with Fracking and Drilling
In Colorado and other Western States, drilling and fracking operations are moving closer to communities, homes, schools, water supplies, and farms. This report finds that people living in close proximity to industrial drilling and fracking operations are experiencing health problems that range from asthma to cancer. The findings underscore the necessity for land use and best practice regulations to be implemented.
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