00:00Time has expired. The chair recognizes the gentleman from Wyoming, the chair of the Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries, Ms. Hageman.
00:07Thank you, and thank you for being here, Mr. Secretary.
00:11On February 3rd, you issued Secretarial Order 3418, consistent with President Trump's Unleashing American Energy Executive Order.
00:21You were directing the department to review and revise both the Buffalo and the Rock Springs Resource Management Plans issued under the Biden administration.
00:29Just last week, cooperating agencies were notified by the BLM of an opportunity to discuss amendments to the Rock Springs RMP, and we welcome that development.
00:40Now, yesterday, you had an opportunity to provide some information to Senator Barrasso in his questioning related to the Rock Springs RMP, so I'd like to focus on the Buffalo RMP.
00:51Could you please give us a brief update in terms of the process related to what is happening with the Buffalo RMP?
00:59Yeah, we have to give you a top line, and happy to have my team give you more detail, but as you've seen in your home state, under the Biden administration,
01:11there was a number of these resource management plans that basically were focused on, I felt, complete violation of the multiple-use doctrine,
01:22in so much as that in some cases, they actually created out a whole cloth, things that didn't even exist in law, nothing that Congress had created.
01:29But these areas of critical impact, it sounds very dramatic, but basically it was preventing almost any aspect of land use and had a huge encroachment on farming, ranching, or any other kind of surface activity.
01:44And, of course, a lot of this was built around the sage-grouse, and the sage-grouse isn't even on, it's not on the endangered or the threatened list.
01:52And so the idea that somehow we're going to take lands and create entire management plans which wipe out the local economies seems in direct opposition to both the will of the people,
02:05the states and the tribes that we work with, and also the law.
02:09So we're just trying to get back and follow the law and do consultation with the people that are impacted.
02:14And we appreciate the return to the rule of law and actually applying and enforcing FLIPMA as it was written,
02:22rather than as someone would like to have had it be written.
02:25And getting to the Endangered Species Act, sometimes those of us on this side of the dice are falsely accused of trying to undermine the Endangered Species Act
02:34but I don't think that there's any better way to undermine the ESA than keeping a species listed well past the point that it has been fully recovered,
02:44which describes the greater Yellowstone ecosystem grizzly bear to a T, a species that has been fully recovered for over two decades, over 20 years.
02:53Everyone agrees we have far exceeded the recovery goals for the GYE grizzly bear.
03:00With that in mind, would you commit to working with myself and my colleagues from Montana and Idaho to fix the disastrous grizzly bear rule
03:09that you inherited from your predecessor and work with us to delist the greater Yellowstone ecosystem grizzly bear?
03:15Yes, we'd be happy to do that.
03:18Wonderful. Thank you.
03:19The grizzlies have gotten, the population is so big and they've moved from the Yellowstone into the bighorns
03:24and then they're moving the black bears out of the bighorns and for the first time in a long time we had bears in western North Dakota last year
03:31and which we don't have bears there so they were bears there looking for love in all the wrong places because there were only a few of them
03:37but the grizzlies are definitely expanding their territory and that's affecting other populations.
03:43Yes, they are and it's definitely affecting our other wildlife.
03:46It's putting at risk our farmers and ranchers.
03:48So this is something that needs to be done.
03:51Your predecessors have recognized that the grizzly bear is recovered. We need to remove them from the list.
03:57President Trump has repeatedly stated that he intends to stop the construction of new onshore and offshore wind turbines.
04:04In southeastern Wyoming, however, there are 3,000 new turbines covering nearly 3,000 miles under review for approval.
04:14The BLM has been relying on brief environmental assessments or EAs rather than a cumulative environmental impact statement for approval of these large projects.
04:26Does the BLM's rush to develop wind in Wyoming comply with current federal policy and would a moratorium on these projects be appropriate
04:35until adequate environmental oversight can be done to be more in line with the president's wishes?
04:41The president has asked us to review all offshore wind projects and how they were permitted in the time frame
04:50and there certainly is no appetite in this administration for adding more intermittent unreliable to the grid.
05:01I mean, it's a grid problem.
05:02It's not that we're, it's just, you know, any form of intermittent is a problem.
05:06So we'll be happy to work with you and, yes, we're taking a look at all that because that grid imbalance creates a real risk for the country.
05:13Well, and very quickly, one last issue.
05:15We now know that wind turbines account for 44 percent of eagle deaths in Wyoming, surpassing vehicle shootings and electrocutions combined.
05:24This shows you the failure of mitigation of the thousands of wind turbines that have already been constructed.
05:30Would you work with me to take steps to ensure meaningful eagle protection measures?
05:36Yes, and we need more technology around the bird strike issue on wind projects in North Dakota and the central flyway is, I think, greatly underestimated.
05:48There's technology that can help us understand exactly how many birds we're killing in those flyways also.
