Comment on FR Doc # 2026-12734

I am a resident of northern Virginia. I am very much opposed to the proposed regulation. As a climate activist and mother of two children who I would like to see be able to continue to live in a sustainable environment on a planet that has not been make uninhabitable by climate change, I find the rule change to be grossly unfair to the American public that owns the lands to which these changes apply. The fossil fuel industry does not care about the public, and I deeply regret that BLM is proposing a rule change that only serves the fossil fuel industry and not the public. And in serving the fossil fuel industry and making drilling on public lands easier and subject to less public scrutiny, you are assuring that climate change will continue unabated and our planet will continue on its current path of being made uninhabitable for future generations. The 90% reduction in the bond that would be required of the fossil fuel industry to drill on public lands makes no sense in light of the cost of site plugging, capping, and remediation. It would end up that the American public would have to pay to fix the mess created by drilling, while the fossil fuel industries continue to get rich. There is no conceivable reason for the reduction. The fossil fuel industry is making the profit while the public pays the cost of cleaning up the mess they made in the process. While conservatives rail against the federal deficit, they engage in policies that will increase the deficit, when they should be applying the principles of capitalism and make those profiting from their activities pay the cost of those activities. Further, the idea of reducing the amount of time that the public has to comment on such proposed rule changes is ludicrous and totally unfair. It can have only one purpose - to suppress public expression and reaction to rule changes. Ten days is barely enough time for a person to become aware of the changes, much less pull together the information to make an informed opinion about the changes and convey them to the agencies charged with responding to the public need. As with the first proposed change, this proposed change is antithetical to the values of our democracy and is designed solely to cater to the rich industries making money at the expense of the public. You have an obligation in a free society to listen to the public and allow them time to make their opinions heard. This rule change is contrary to that obligation. To sum it up, these changes support the already overly powerful corporate class in this society at the expense, literal and figurative, of the American public, who owns the public lands and theoretically is supposed to be represented by this government. Yet, these changes are counter to the interest of the American public and could have been written by the fossil fuel industry, inasmuch as it will add billions to their pockets by suppression of views that would otherwise hold them accountable to the government and american public.