Emissions from fossil fuels produced on US federal lands and waters present opportunities for climate mitigation

Nathan Ratledge, Laura Zachary and Chase Huntley
Additional contact information
Laura Zachary: Apogee Economics and Policy
Chase Huntley: The Wilderness Society

Climatic Change, 2022, vol. 171, issue 1, No 10, 8 pages

Abstract: Abstract Between 2005 and 2019, a quarter of US fossil fuel production came from federal lands and waters. We estimate that the extraction, transportation and combustion of these fuels resulted in emissions equivalent to roughly 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. To better understand their future role in the US emissions profile, we use publicly available data and machine learning to model coal, oil and natural gas production on federal lands and waters to 2030, and calculate associated life cycle climate emissions. We estimate that total emissions from fossil fuels produced on federal lands and waters decline 6% below 2019 levels by 2030; and note that absent additional policy, further reductions may be challenging as some of the cheapest fossil fuels occur on federally owned lands and many are effectively subsidized.

Keywords: Energy policy; Climate policy; Climate change; Federal lands; Machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-021-03302-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:171:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s10584-021-03302-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-021-03302-x

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().