EASIER SAID
President-elect’s vow to ban more drilling on fed lands won’t be easy.
One of Joe Biden’s boldest campaign pledges was to ban “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters,” part of a sweeping agenda aimed at curbing greenhouse gases that are warming the planet and threatening life on Earth.
Transforming that promise into reality, however, will be tough.
The incoming administration will face several legal and political hurdles if it seeks to halt new oil and gas permits on federal land and waters, given existing laws and the enormous sums that drilling royalties generate for the federal and state governments — including Democratic-leaning states such as New Mexico and Colorado. But failure to do so is sure to become a flash point with environmental and youth activists within the Democratic Party, who helped elect him and have made climate a priority.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, in a bid to help its allies in the oil and gas business before it leaves office, has embarked on an 11th-hour leasing spree to help those companies lock in rights to drill. It offered up 79 million acres of leases in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday,
selling nearly 518,000 acres. And it is rushing to auction off rights to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.
In a recent interview, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said that Biden would not be able to halt new drilling on public lands and waters until his first term ends. “If their intention is to end all leasing and permitting, they will find that that’s rife with conflicts, opposed by Democratic governors, and not perpetually legally sustainable.”
But Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and most influential environmental groups, said his members expect nothing less than a ban from the candidate they helped elect.
“The Biden campaign made a clear and unequivocal campaign promise to end fossil fuel leasing on public land.” Brune said. “That’s a big reason why we had Sierra Club members write more than a million letters to undecided voters, make more than 5 million phone calls to undecided voters and send 20 million text messages.”
There is little question that energy development on public lands and waters represents a significant share of America’s global warming pollution. The fossil fuels that are extracted there and eventually burned to run cars, heat homes, operate factories and generate electricity account for nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, according to a 2018 U.S. Geological Survey study.
Still, lawmakers from both parties have welcomed drilling as a source of jobs and revenue for decades. President Barack Obama worked to curtail U.S. coal production on public land, but he praised natural gas production as an important bridge to clean energy. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to expand oil and gas drilling across the country, scaling back protected areas, offering more leases and accelerating federal approval for pipelines and other drillingrelated projects.
Fossil fuel gas activity on federal and tribal land and offshore last year generated
$11.7 billion in tax revenue, according to the Interior Department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue. Of that total, the U.S. Treasury kept $4.9 billion, more than $2.4 billion went to state and local governments and the rest funded tribes, restoration, conservation and other projects.
But as climate projections have become dire, Democrats have embraced a “keep it in the ground” strategy aimed at ending this activity altogether without the help of a sharply divided Congress. According to a Washington Post survey, every 2020 Democratic presidential candidate pledged to ban fossil fuel leasing with the exception of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, both of whom hail from energy-producing states.
Biden repeatedly brought up the issue on the campaign trail, saying that he would shift the nation away from fossil fuels while allowing fracking to continue on private land in places like Pennsylvania, which happened to be a swing state pivotal to his victory.
At a town hall in New Hampshire in February, he said he opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, given the impacts of climate change on Alaska, before adding, “And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” The crowd clapped enthusiastically.
Frank Macchiarola, the American Petroleum Institute’s senior vice president for policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in an interview that his group is well aware of Biden’s pledge. “But we also recognize that that was a campaign proposal, and campaigning is often different from governing,” he said.