While President Donald Trump has caused chaos and confusion in his first few weeks in office, he’s made one thing very clear: His administration will do everything in its power to supercharge oil and gas production.
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
That agenda is unwelcome news for a small lizard in West Texas.
The dunes sagebrush lizard—a tan, scaly reptile measuring just a few inches long—lives in the Permian Basin, the largest oil producing region in the country. It’s found nowhere else on Earth. The basin stretches across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico and produces, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent of US oil. It’s likely that you’ve traveled in a car or plane using fuel derived from oil in the Permian Basin.
Drilling for oil and gas, and the infrastructure that supports it, harms the dunes sagebrush lizard, according to more than two decades of research. Roads and well pads damage and fragment the reptile’s habitat, as does the process of mining sand for fracking. These activities are threatening to extinguish the lizard, which is now unable to survive across nearly half of its historic range, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a government agency.
To stave off extinction, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the lizard as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act last spring. The ESA is the nation’s strongest law for protecting wildlife. Under the law, it’s illegal to kill endangered animals and plants (with some exceptions) and the government is required to devise and implement a plan to revive their populations.
Now, however, environmental advocates fear that federal protections for this lizard—which were decades in the making—are at risk. Donald Trump’s agenda for energy dominance has allied his administration with the oil industry, which has long viewed regulations to protect rare animals as a barrier to drilling. Especially when they live in oil country.
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