ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

such as using similar methodologies to estimate the social cost of carbon and
other greenhouse gases. In summary, the North American Climate, Clean
Energy, and Environment Partnership Action Plan aims to advance clean
and secure energy, drive down short-lived climate pollutants, promote clean
and efficient transportation, protect nature and advance science, and show
global leadership in addressing climate change.
In 2015, about 41 percent of U.S. coal was produced on Federally
managed land, and this coal was responsible for about 10 percent of U.S.
greenhouse gas emissions (BLM 2016a). The President’s 2016 State of
the Union address called 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.” Three days later, Department of the Interior Secretary Sally
Jewell announced the first comprehensive review of the Federal coal leasing
program in over 30 years (DOI 2016). This announcement followed a series
of listening sessions across the country in 2015, initiated by Secretary Jewell,
to consider if taxpayers and local communities were getting fair returns on
public resources, how the coal leasing structure could improve in transparency
and competitiveness, and how the federal coal program could be managed
consistently with national climate change mitigation objectives (BLM
2016b). The Department of the Interior has yet to complete its analysis of
these issues. However, the current structure of the coal leasing program does
not price externalities from coal combustion, and independent analysis by
CEA concludes that it does not provide a fair return to taxpayers, making
this review a crucial policy step from an economic perspective (CEA 2016a).
Through a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)
expected to be prepared over three years, the review will examine the
Interior Department’s current process to determine when, where, and
how to provide leases and respond to feedback and concerns raised during
the listening sessions as well as by the Government Accountability Office
(GAO 2013). The review will inform how the Federal coal program can be
reformed to ensure a fair return to American taxpayers for public resources
while considering the environmental and public health impact of Federal
coal production.
While the review is underway, mining will continue under existing
leases, but the Department of the Interior will pause new leases, with some
limited exceptions. This is consistent with practices under the previous
two programmatic reviews in the 1970s and 1980s. The Department of the
Interior also announced a series of reforms to improve the transparency of
the Federal coal program, including the establishment of a publicly available
database to monitor carbon emissions from fossil fuels on public lands and
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