Biden’s offshore drilling plan is a lose-lose
A win-win in politics is rare. A loselose? That’s its own accomplishment.
When the Biden administration released its proposal for up to 10 new offshore drilling leases along the Gulf Coast earlier this month, it seemed to be just that.
Climate advocates warn that any new leases would be too many for a planet already warming fast, while industry folks argue that the figure — compared to the the scores of leases President Donald Trump had proposed — is a sleight of hand from an administration aiming to punish the oil industry.
As for the rest of us, new leases — whatever the number — over a fiveyear period do little to ease the stress on our wallets at the pump today. It takes years to begin producing oil from an offshore drilling operation, and who knows what the gas prices will be by then. They’ve already begun to fall.
What it does do, however, is send the wrong signal on climate change, and breaks with what Joe Biden and company promised on the campaign trail, too. He was right when he said that America needs to shift toward more sustainable energy sources.
Backtracking now, even in a small way, is not a move that we can afford, not when “climate change is the greatest threat facing our country and our world.”
Sound familiar? That’s Campaign Joe. Remember him? The one that promised historic investments in clean energy and “a 100 percent clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050 here at home.”
Those pledges, while alarming to our city with its economy based heavily on fossil fuels, aren’t out of line with what even some of the biggest oil and gas companies across the world have already promised. That doesn’t make them simple to achieve, and it doesn’t relieve the obligation for Biden to find ways for workers in the oil and gas industry to use their skills — and keep their earning potential — in a greener economy.
That’s a big challenge, and it’s not made any easier, admittedly, by the state of the world confronting Biden and all of us. High gas prices. Conflict with Russia — and its impact on global oil and gas supply. And a surge in demand for energy as the world seeks to shed its pandemic malaise.
But none of these challenges, pressing as they are, are as serious as climate change — something candidate Biden understood.
The proposal for the National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program is just the latest five-year plan required by law. The current version on the table offers up to 11 new leases off the Gulf Coast and Alaska and came alongside the administration’s first set of onshore lease sales. Both are welcome departures from the drill, baby, drill impetus behind Trump’s plans, and far less than what oil companies wanted.
And they are, of course, not final yet.
Still, we think they represent a step — even if it’s a baby step — backward.
“President Biden campaigned on an ambitious vision of climate action and environmental justice, and selling off any new leases in the Gulf for offshore drilling would be out of step with those commitments,” John Dunmore, with the Sierra Club's Lands Protection Program, told the editorial board in an email. “The science is clear that, in order to meet our climate goals and avert the worst of the climate crisis, there can be no new expansion of fossil fuel drilling.”
Meanwhile, if the administration thinks it’s throwing oil and gas a bone, it doesn’t seem anyone’s biting.
“From our perspective, it’s disappointing,” said Frank Macchiarola, the senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs with American Petroleum Institute. While he said he’d welcome the handful of new leases that could come from the proposal, he’s doubtful that will actually be the outcome.
“It’s sort of a cop out,” Macchiarola told the editorial board. “They should just come out and say, ‘We’re opposed to oil and gas.’ ”
The industry says the paltry plans for new leases sends a dampening message to oil and gas companies weighing investment decisions. “They’re making decisions today that impact the market sentiment today,” Macchiarola said.
But then, the administration could be sending an even stronger message to the alternative energy market. Instead of throwing the oil and gas industry a bone, Biden could be seizing on the current crisis — high energy prices are on everyone’s minds — and urging an all-hands-on-deck approach to innovating our way around the crisis. America needs to become less reliant on fossil fuels, so why not send signals to the market that investments in green energy will bring rewards?
That’s what it will take, surely, for the administration to meet its own climate goals of cutting emissions in half by 2030 and meeting net-zero by 2050.
As Congress and the public kick the tires of Biden’s new proposal, we hope they’ll help him remember that times likes these require bold responses, not a please-everyone approach. As he’s finding, that kind of fence-sitting rarely works.
In a summer where Texans are feeling both the pain of a costly oil addiction and the heat of ever-warming summers, now is not the time for hesitating. Biden must lead the country to a place where, yes, it needs less oil, gas and coal, but also where we’ve learned to extract those fuels more cleanly, to reliably supplement them with renewables, and to value the people and industry that make that possible. Doing those things will require unblinking leadership.
Climate advocates warn any new leases would be too many.