Oil and Gas drove Utah Monument decisions?

OMG! Who'd a thunk it? New York Times did the investigation and got 25,000 Dept of Interior documents. 

Headline - Oil and coal drove Trump’s call to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, according to insider emails released by court order

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2018/03/02/interior-department-e...      

From the story -

According to the Times’ documents review, Interior focused from the beginning on coal, oil and gas resources inside the two monuments. The Kaiparowits Plateau, a remote region within the heart of the former Grand Straircase boundaries, holds one of the largest coal deposits, which the Utah Geological Survey estimates contains more than 11 billion tons that are “technologically recoverable,” according to an internal memo.

It also said the monument has some coal-bed methane and 550 barrels of oil held in tar sands deposits, all worth between $2 billion and $18.6 billion. Trump contracted the boundaries to exclude most of the coal reserves and retired oil and gas leases.

The monument review also examined timber and forage made harder to access by the designations, but there was not much to see there. Both monuments remained covered with grazing allotments.

The Grand Staircase memo concluded that the monument contained little harvestable timber and “no reductions in permitted livestock grazing use have been made as a result of the Monument designation.”

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