Biden outpaces Trump on drilling permits
President yet to stop oil, gas leases on public lands despite pledges to limit fossil fuel use
After years of federal lease sales to oil, gas and coal companies, environmentalists had hopes that President Joe Biden would end the fossil fuel bonanza.
But one year after announcing a halt to any new federal oil and gas leasing, Biden has outpaced former President Donald Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands. After setting a record for the largest offshore lease sale last year in the Gulf of Mexico, the Interior Department plans to auction off oil and gas drilling rights on more than 200,000 acres across Western states by the end of March, followed by 1 million acres in the Cook Inlet, off the coast of Alaska.
The administration’s actions reveal an uncomfortable truth: Although Biden supports a shift to cleaner sources of energy, he has failed to curb fossil fuel development in the United States. His push to suspend federal oil and gas auctions has run headlong into political and legal challenges, and his administration has offered no plan to address the climate impact of mining in Wyoming’s coal-rich Powder River Basin. Collectively, these activities account for nearly a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
This month, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management indicated it would reverse the Trump administration’s decision to expand oil and gas production on the largest swath of federal land, the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska — but would allow drilling on half of the reserve.
Four days later, lawyers for the federal government declined to defend former President Barack Obama’s 2016 coal moratorium, which Trump lifted two months after taking office. Instead, they argued environmentalists’ lawsuit to restore it should be dismissed on technical grounds.
Climate activists have expressed dismay at the administration’s actions, questioning how the White House can allow more fossil fuel extraction on public lands, given its commitment to cut U.S. emissions.
“On one hand, we’re very happy with the administration’s climate goals,” said Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s lands protection program. “But we’re very disappointed and really kind of confused as to why the actions on leasing and drilling haven’t matched the rhetoric.”
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana struck down Biden’s Jan. 27, 2021, executive order in June, dealing a major blow to the president’s plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. The decision by Doughty, a Trump appointee, highlights the challenge in curbing fossil fuel production when current law directs the government to auction off federal land and many states rely on royalty revenue. The authority to suspend oil and gas leasing lies “solely with Congress,” Doughty wrote.
Biden officials said they could be held in contempt if they didn’t resume leasing.
Legal challenges have “made it impossible for us to stop many of these leases,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during Thursday’s daily briefing.
Interior spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said the department is “conducting a more comprehensive analysis of greenhouse gas impacts from potential oil and gas lease sales than ever before,” by evaluating the societal impacts of burning fossil fuels and the total climate impact of multiple sales.
Climate advocates said they had expected Biden officials would find a way to slow drilling, either through litigation or by reopening the environmental review process for proposed lease sales.
Instead, the administration approved more than 3,500 oil and gas drilling permits in its first year, nearly 900 more than the Trump administration did in its first year, according to an analysis of federal data by the Center for Biological Diversity.
Last fall, Biden officials put 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico up for auction in the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. While it sold only a fraction of that amount — about 1.7 million acres — it netted nearly $192 million and ranked as the most profitable offshore auction since March 2019.
Before those leases could take effect, a federal judge invalidated the entire sale Thursday, delivering a victory to environmentalists. Judge Rudolph Contreras, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote in his opinion that the government had justified the sale using a flawed analysis, which assumed that the climate impacts would be worse if the acreage went unsold.