The following opinion column was authored by Jeanie Alderson. Jeanie Alderson is co-owner and co-operator of Bones Brothers Ranch and Omega Beef in Birney, and a board member of the Northern Plains Resource Council, a grassroots conservation and family agriculture nonprofit.
My family has been ranching in the Powder River Basin since 1889. Over the six generations we’ve been here, we’ve learned how to take care of the land and water that connects us to our community. As my Dad often cautioned, “We don’t want to make mistakes that won’t forgive us.”
The Senate could make one of those unforgiving mistakes any day now if it uses the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to kill the current Miles City Resource Management Plan (RMP), which guides how the Bureau of Land Management manages public land and minerals in southeast Montana, including the Powder River Basin. The current plan they want to eliminate was developed not by politicians or bureaucrats in D.C., but by those of us who live in southeast Montana, whose lives depend on healthy lands and water, and who have the most to lose from a plan that goes all in on one industry (coal) over all the others.
A plan that gives full supremacy to coal mining is what farmers and ranchers would have to live with if Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy discard the current Miles City RMP. It would mean dismissing all of the local voices, diverse economic interests, and cultural values that went into shaping the current RMP, which ensures that coal mining can exist in the PRB without destroying the livelihoods of ranchers, farmers, outfitters, hunting guides, and others.
Eliminating the current Miles City RMP could open the door to the kind of irresponsible mining that wipes out aquifers. Most alarmingly, it gives companies and their subcontractors the green light to mine the public coal that sits underneath private property. We’re not talking about a few properties either. Eighty-three percent of the land that sits above the federally-owned coal beds is private. Property owners, including my family, could literally have the earth taken out from underneath us if the Senate passed the CRA. And there’s nothing property owners could do in the future to relieve us of this threat, because the CRA would prohibit the BLM from limiting coal leasing in the future, no matter if it’s driving ranchers and farmers out of business.
Congress has never before used the CRA to overturn public land use plans. If Congress chooses to do so now just to appease the fossil fuel industry, it will almost certainly initiate an endless cycle of litigation that could grind the approval process for grazing permits, timber harvests, recreation events, and even energy development to a halt. This type of disruption will make it all the harder for ranchers and other business owners to plan for the future and keep our bottom lines in the black.
And for what reason does the Senate need to put our livelihoods at such risk? Certainly not national energy security, as Daines and Sheehy claim, because the current RMP allows current leaseholders to continue mining federal coal for the foreseeable future.
In the Powder River Basin alone, the Spring Creek Mine has enough coal under lease to continue operating through 2035, while the Rosebud Mine has enough under lease to continue mining until 2060, enough to flood the market for decades to come.
There simply isn’t much demand for coal anymore because it’s too expensive. Recent analysis shows that 99% of coal plants are more expensive to run than renewable energy generation facilities, resulting in the fact that a mere 15% of energy generated in the U.S. now comes from coal. Do Daines and Sheehy really want to increase the cost of heating and cooling our homes simply to prop up a dying coal industry?
Even if there was a demand for coal, Montanans would have much less to gain than before because the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill slashed coal royalty rates from 12.5% to 7% — a 40%-plus reduction in how much Montana now receives in royalties for schools, hospitals, law enforcement, and roads.
I’m calling on Sens. Daines and Sheehy to respect those of us in Montana who worked on the Miles City RMP and leave the plan alone. They should know: Public land management decisions should never belong to politicians and corporate lobbyists in D.C., people who do not have to live with the consequences of their actions, as we do.
Originally published here
