Trump Proposes Opening Over 1 Million Acres of California Public Lands to Drilling, Fracking

The areas slated by Trump for drilling and fracking are near spectacular public lands, including state parks, national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, and the Carrizo Plain National Monument. Oil companies could target land around popular sites like Pinnacles National Park, Mount Diablo State Park, Henry W. Coe State Park and Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve.

“California’s public lands are a refuge for human wonder and beautiful wildlife, not places for Trump’s oil and gas cronies to exploit and pollute,” said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “We won’t let this administration get away with permanently destroying our public lands. We’ll fight his perverse effort to worsen climate change and expose California’s people and wildlife to more toxic pollution from dirty drilling and fracking.”

Draft environmental impact statements and resource management plans from the Bureau of Land Management would allow new fossil fuel extraction across eight counties under the Bakersfield Field Office: Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura. The Central Coast plan would allow drilling across another 10 counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Merced, Monterey, San Benito, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Joaquin.

The first Trump administration unveiled these plans in 2019, but the Center for Biological Diversity and allies successfully fought them off. Settlement agreements suspended new oil and gas leasing on public lands in these areas until the BLM could produce new environmental analyses that sufficiently evaluate the impacts of oil and gas development, including fracking. The documents released today are still inadequate.

At the state level, California has made significant moves to curb dangerous oil and gas drilling including banning fracking, and recent laws to speed oil well cleanup, affirm local governments’ ability to ban or limit oil and gas operations, and a historic health-and-safety buffer between communities and oil and gas sites.

The areas targeted in the Trump plans are home to threatened and endangered animals and plants, including San Joaquin kit foxes, giant kangaroo rats, burrowing owls, California condors, and the California jewelflower. Areas that could see harmful drilling and fracking are also near communities already harmed by legacy pollution.


Photo: Mount Diablo State Park | Credit: Hollin Kretzmann


The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.8 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/trump-proposes-opening-over-1-million-acres-of-california-public-lands-to-drilling-fracking-2026-01-12/