President-elect Donald Trump has ambitious plans to use U.S. federal lands for natural resource extraction.

But Trump – who promised at the Republican National Convention in July to “drill, baby, drill” if he were to be re-elected, he may not be able to carry out the vast majority of his projects because of existing protections and the way federal lands are defined, environmental law experts told ABC News .

Trump won’t be able to “just turn on the spigot” for new oil and gas drilling on his first day in office, Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s land protection program, told ABC News.

“Every administration gets to the point where they have to differentiate between the rhetoric they use in the campaign and the real challenges when it comes to governing,” said Stan Meiburg, executive director of the Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability from Wake Forest University. told ABC News.

National parksWilderness areas, wildlife refuges, military reservations, and public lands are owned and managed by the federal government.

Public lands are intended to be used for the public good, but for about a century this definition has sometimes been confused to also include the extraction of natural resources, such as oil, gas, minerals and timber, according to Peter Colohan, director of federal strategies at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a nonpartisan think tank.

Federal lands are “for the benefit and enjoyment of all,” Colohan told ABC News, referring to former President Teddy Roosevelt’s famous phrase inscribed on the arch at the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

Trump achieved what environmentalists widely saw as a anti-environmental political regime during his first term, withdraw from the Paris Agreement fight climate change as soon as he took office in 2016 – something he said he planned to do again, reversing President Biden’s January 20, 2021 action to join the agreement – dispose of clean water and protection from air pollution, and speeding up environmental reviews of dozens of major energy and infrastructure projects, such as drilling and fuel pipelines, which Trump said would help boost energy production and the American economy.

During his next term, Trump has also promised to significantly increase fossil fuel production in the United States, even though the United States already produces and exports fossil fuels. record quantity of crude oil under the Biden administration.

“I think it is absolutely certain that Trump will push to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 19.3 million acres in northeast Alaska that provides critical habitat for several species, to drilling oil tanker unhindered, as well as areas outside the refuge along the Alaska coast,” Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, told ABC News. “He’s been aiming for this for years.”

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News for this story.

Regulatory challenges

The president and executive branch may have “wide latitude” over control of public lands and monuments, but existing laws aimed at protecting lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be difficult to overturn, Suckling said.

Since the 1970s, a series of environmental regulations have been put in place to protect the American landscape, such as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, followed by the Drinking water law in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The Clean Air Act was created in 1963 and has been modified several times since, the first time in 1970.

Because of this environmental legal infrastructure, it would be virtually impossible for Trump to easily or unilaterally change these protections, experts said. For the Trump administration to reverse regulations banning the use of protected lands for energy production, it would need to present evidence demonstrating that the proposed actions would not violate existing environmental laws, Suckling said.

“You have to use the best science available and if the science doesn’t support your policy, the law won’t allow you to implement it,” Suckling said.

The day after Trump’s re-election, President Joe Biden moved restrict the scope of the lease in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, signed by Trump in 2017, to limit oil drilling. The Biden administration found “legal loopholes” in leases that would have allowed the Trump administration to increase fossil fuel production, Colohan said.

The biggest obstacle to Trump’s plans to drill on federally protected lands is whether these areas are actually economically competitive, compared to places where people drill on private lands using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking , Meiburg said.

However, most federal lands are not protected, Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice, told ABC News. For these unprotected lands, it is possible that Trump will issue an executive order to lease them for energy production. Still, any time a decision is made to lease public land, “there will definitely be a legal battle,” Colohan said, adding that executive orders are “more reversible” than an existing statutory regulation.

Environmental activist resistance

For Trump to open federal lands for leasing, his administration is required by law to notify the public, with environmental lawyers certain to be prepared to challenge it.

“Environmental laws are carefully designed to produce a stable, democratic and scientific outcome,” Suckling said. “You can’t just come in, jump out and do whatever you want, and that’s why the United States has one of the best protected environments – one of the cleanest, healthiest environments of all nations of the planet.”

During Trump’s first term, the Biological Center for Diversity sued his administration 266 times and won about 90% of those actions, Suckling said. Earthjustice has filed about 200 lawsuits against the Trump administration and has won about 85 percent of them, according to Caputo.

“We’re going to have to go after their pants every chance we get,” said Manuel of the Sierra Club.

The Trump administration will also likely face opposition from other stakeholders, such as Native American tribes, who could be affected if federal lands are leased for energy extraction, Meiburg said.

Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election may have been the speed bump needed to thwart his federal lands agenda, some experts also said. Now that he has been re-elected four years later, he is essentially a one-term president and many of his proposed actions could be tied up in litigation for years, Suckling said.

Conversely, if Trump had been in office for eight straight years, it might have given him the continuity needed to enact more sweeping changes to federal land use, Caputo said. If the House or Senate came under Democratic control after the midterm elections, Trump’s agenda would likely be even more blunted, Manuel said.

However, constant change in the regulatory environment also poses a challenge for land managers and environmental agencies because it can slow progress in environmental protection, Colohan said.

All land is under pressure – whether from development, resource extraction, agricultural use, climate change or biodiversity loss, Colohan said. But federal lands carry the ideal of conservation for public good, recreation, cultural purposes, and climate mitigation and resilience, he added.

“Those things are the best, the long-term benefits that come from conservation,” Colohan said. “And it’s really a choice that is made by each administration.”