The Obama administration will be canceling opportunities for companies to mine for coal on federal land and raising the costs of extracting natural resources — from coal, to gas, to oil — on properties controlled by the government.
The White House is expected to unveil such plans Friday, just three days after President Barack Obama pledged in his State of the Union Address to “change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.”
That likely means increasing fees and imposing other regulations to make it more costly to extract fossil fuels from federal lands. Obama says these reforms will “put money back into those communities and put tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st century transportation system.”
The Interior Department will impose a moratorium on new coal leases “under most circumstances,” according to The Washington Post, while bureaucrats decide what needs to be reformed. Regulators will also be forced to consider how much new coal mines would contribute to global warming before approving any federal leases.
