2026 Brings Fewer New Oil Projects, Refocused Tribal Co-Stewardship, and a Backlash to the Idea that Nature is Nonpartisan
- Fewer New Oil Projects.
In 2026, we’ll see more lease-sales theater and regulatory rollbacks, but the real limiting factor will be economics. Expect renewed pressure to expand leasing and accelerate approvals on federal lands, including in the Alaska Arctic—not necessarily because industry is poised to flood the zone with new production, but because lease sales and rollbacks are a high-visibility way to signal allegiance to extraction politics. The “wins” will look like attempted lease sales, shorter timelines, weakened safeguards, and a deregulatory posture designed to reshape agency behavior and normalize the idea that protected landscapes are inventory. But the hardest constraint won’t be messaging, or even permits. It will be capital discipline and price. Arctic and other frontier projects sit high on the global cost curve; if there’s a downturn or oil price softness, that’s the thing that actually slows drilling, because these plays are expensive, long-lead, and vulnerable when money tightens. The paradox is that the loudest public-lands drilling fights may happen in years when the market is least likely to reward new frontier investment.
- Refocused Tribal Co-Stewardship
Tribal co-stewardship has been expanded under Biden, but 2026 will force it out of the realm of symbolic memorandum-of-understanding announcements and into operational reality where it matters most: wildfire mitigation, prescribed burning, and cross-jurisdiction fuels strategy in the wildland-urban interface and along reservation-federal borders. As wildfire seasons lengthen and suppression costs keep climbing, I expect to see more co-stewardship defined by implementation capacity—shared burn windows, workforce development, liability frameworks—and enabling tribes (and adjacent federal units) to move faster than the bureaucratic “perfect plan” cycle. The most meaningful partnerships will be the ones that measurably reduce risk to people, watersheds, and cultural sites.
- A Backlash to “Nature is Nonpartisan” Messaging
In 2026, we'll see growing resistance to the feel-good framing that nature sits above politics. The reality is that public lands are governed by choices: budgets, rules, enforcement, courts, and elected officials who do have stated intentions to open, degrade, or privatize parts of the commons. In 2026, I think communicators and leaders will increasingly say the quiet part out loud: stewardship is not neutral, and pretending it is can function as a permission slip for the people most willing to break things. The healthier framing won’t be left vs. right; it’ll be engaged vs. disengaged, and whether the public is willing to defend institutions that actually manage land and risk.
