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us department of the interior
Biden Offshore Drilling Plan Continues 'Dangerous Cycle'
"Offshore oil and gas drilling is not only dirty and dangerous, but it also supercharges the existing climate crisis," said one campaigner.
Dec 15, 2023
The Biden administration on Friday finalized a five-year plan for offshore fossil fuel leasing that was initially released in September and sharply condemned as a "climate nightmare."
The Department of the Interior (DOI) highlighted in a statement Friday that the 2024-29 National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program has the fewest sales in history, with just three for the Gulf of Mexico set to be held in 2025, 2027, and 2029.
The DOI also stressed that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) signed last year by President Joe Biden "prohibits the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) from issuing a lease for offshore wind development unless the agency has offered at least 60 million acres for oil and gas leasing on the OCS in the previous year."
"BOEM continues to treat the Gulf as a region where community health and well-being can be sacrificed to allow continued oil and gas production."
That part of the IRA is one of the key reasons it has been criticized by climate campaigners, who continue to warn that the landmark package is far from enough to meet the U.S. goal of halving planet-heating emissions by the end of this decade.
The DOI's plan outraged the American Petroleum Institute and U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) for not being friendly enough to the fossil fuel industry while advocates for the planet warned that it's not bold enough given the worsening climate emergency.
"Offshore oil and gas drilling is not only dirty and dangerous, but it also supercharges the existing climate crisis," Beth Lowell, Oceana's vice president for the United States, declared in a Friday statement about the finalized program. She pointed out that the process actually began under former President Donald Trump, who proposed 47 leasing sales.
"This five-year plan started with President Trump proposing to open nearly all U.S. waters to offshore oil drilling and ends with President Biden's final plan that is the smallest to date," she said. "The footprint of offshore drilling was not expanded, but the dangerous cycle of drilling and spilling must end."
After the Biden administration released its proposal in September, Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Irene Gutierrez wrote the following month that "BOEM continues to treat the Gulf as a region where community health and well-being can be sacrificed to allow continued oil and gas production."
"BOEM also fails to account for the severe risks from additional oil and gas leasing to the Gulf ecosystem and species like the critically endangered Rice's whale," Gutierrez charged. "BOEM's analysis also treats catastrophic oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon disaster as events that are speculative and unlikely to repeat again, and the program excludes such spills from its analysis."
"In our comments to the proposed program and in other advocacy, we urged BOEM to issue a program with no new lease sales. The agency has ample authority to do so," she noted. "Further, declining fossil fuel demand and existing energy reserves mean that no new offshore leasing is needed for at least the next 30 years to meet national energy needs. BOEM could have issued a zero-lease sale plan, but declined to do so, despite calls from a wide range of community and environmental groups for no new leasing in the Gulf."
The DOI plan comes near the end of what experts have said will be the hottest year on record. It also comes on the heels of United Nations climate talks that scientists called "a tragedy for the planet," given that the final deal out of COP28 called for "transitioning away from fossil fuels," but did not endorse the "phaseout" demanded by civil society and most participating countries.
Biden—who is seeking reelection next year and may face off against Trump—has previously come under fire from frontline communities and climate organizations for skipping that U.N. summit, supporting the Willow oil project and Mountain Valley Pipeline, enabling the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports, and refusing to declare a national climate emergency.
On Thursday, the Biden administration released new proposed guidance on clean energy tax credits from the IRA.
"President Biden must do so much more if he wants to be taken seriously by young voters," Michele Weindling, political director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said in response to the guidance. "He is overseeing an explosion in oil and gas production that has resulted in the U.S. producing more fossil fuels than ever before."
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Biden Proposal for Fossil Fuel Leasing on Public Lands Called 'Massive Climate Failure'
"President Biden is blowing an opportunity to end oil and gas extraction on public land as the world reels from one climate catastrophe to the next," said a Center for Biological Diversity campaigner.
Jul 20, 2023
Years after U.S. President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to ban new oil and gas leases on public lands, his administration earned fresh criticism from green groups on Thursday with a proposal to update regulations for the federal fossil fuel leasing program.
The U.S. Department of the Interior unveiled a proposed rule for the outdated fiscal terms of the onshore oil and gas leasing program. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Tracy Stone-Manning said it "aims to ensure fairness to the taxpayer and balanced, responsible development as we continue to transition to a clean energy economy."
However, advocacy organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity slammed the rule as a "massive climate failure."
"This is a cowardly proposal that fails the basic climate imperative of ending fossil fuel expansion and phasing out production," said Taylor McKinnon, the center's Southwest director. "President Biden is blowing an opportunity to end oil and gas extraction on public land as the world reels from one climate catastrophe to the next. This dangerous plan would ravage more of the landscape with fracking while sealing our fate of increasing megafires, more preventable heat deaths, a shrinking Colorado River, and runaway wildlife extinctions."
The center is among more than 500 groups that responded to the rule with a letter urging Biden to "rapidly phase down federal fossil fuel extraction and production on public lands" to near-zero by 2030, as part of the global effort to meet the 2015 Paris climate agreement's 1.5°C goal.
"Any rule that fails to phase out oil and gas production on public lands will sacrifice human lives, ecosystems, and entire species at the altar of fossil fuel corporations and their insatiable quest for profit," McKinnon warned. "It will be another shameful addition to Biden's record alongside the Willow project, his thousands of new drilling permits, and his rollback of environmental laws to enable illegal fossil fuel pipelines."
Biden successfully challenged former President Donald Trump three years ago in part by pledging to take the climate emergency seriously and reverse the Republican's attacks on the planet. While the Democrat has certainly made some progress, particularly compared with his predecessor, he has also come under fire for failing to live up to what he promised as a candidate.
The BLM's new proposal comes as both Biden and Trump are running in the 2024 presidential contest and as much of the Northern Hemisphere is dealing with extreme heat intensified by global warming that has been largely driven by fossil fuels.
"Even as record heatwaves bake the country and floods ravage eastern states, the Biden administration continues to cozy up to Big Oil," said Nicole Ghio at Friends of the Earth. "President Biden can't be a climate leader unless he addresses the root cause of the climate crisis: fossil fuels. Turning a blind eye to his broken leasing program proves once again that Biden is content to fiddle away while the world burns."
As the Western Environmental Law Center (WELC) highlighted Thursday, the BLM "telegraphed its modest intentions for the proposed rule in its November 2021 Report on the Federal Oil and Gas Program, which we noted at the time failed to live up to its billing as a 'comprehensive review' responding to the climate crisis."
Several campaigners sounded the alarm over that report, which was produced in response to a Biden executive order. One critic said that "greenlighting more fossil fuel extraction, then pretending it's OK by nudging up royalty rates, is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," a sentiment that was echoed by a WELC senior attorney on Thursday.
"Following months of consecutive climate disasters, the Bureau of Land Management's determination to rearrange deck chairs instead of deploying lifeboats is deeply disturbing," said WELC's Melissa Hornbein. "Coming from an administration that kicked off its tenure with some of the loftiest climate rhetoric of any government on the global stage, Interior's obdurate reaffirmation of the status quo is staggering."
Some advocacy groups were more tempered in their responses to the rule, while still stressing the need to end such leasing.
"These changes were badly needed—to put it mildly—and will help make onshore leasing more fair to taxpayers and hold industry accountable for its harms," said Josh Axelrod, senior policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The agency is aiming to limit leasing to areas with existing development and the most viable resources, and is clarifying how it will implement fiscal reforms in the Biden administration's historic climate law."
"But we can't continue to lease our public lands for fossil fuels while facing climate and biodiversity emergencies—and what is truly key moving forward is for the agency to forge an approach for measuring and mitigating the program's impact on climate," Axelrod added.
Public Citizen president Robert Weissman similarly said that "these rules are a welcome change from the long-standing status quo of policies that provide giveaways to the oil and gas industry. Antiquated rules incentivize oil and gas corporations to shirk their obligation to clean up the mess they create, leaving old, rusty wells pocking the national landscape and foisting the cleanup bill on taxpayers."
"Today's proposed rules would impose realistic financial requirements on oil and gas corporations to pay for the remediation of old, decrepit wells, as federal law requires," Weissman pointed out.
"While these rules are helpful, the Biden administration's proposal continues with the climate-destroying practice of leasing federal lands for drilling, which is entirely out of sync with the administration's climate goals," he emphasized. "But as long as drilling exists on public property, corporate polluters should be held to a high standard for operating and cleaning up their wells."
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360+ Groups Asked Biden to End Oil and Gas on Public Lands by 2035. His Answer? No.
Campaigners blasted the rejection of their petition as "beyond disappointing" and "an appalling abdication of climate leadership."
Jun 29, 2023
As U.S. President Joe Biden seeks reelection as a climate and environmental justice champion, his administration on Thursday officially rejected a petition from over 360 organizations to phase out oil and gas extraction for public lands and waters by 2035.
"It's beyond disappointing that the administration has opted to deny our petition and hide behind other rulemaking efforts that are likely to prove ineffective in the long run in this code red climate moment," declared Hallie Templeton, legal director for Friends of the Earth.
"The U.S. and the world need bold action to phase out fossil fuels," she stressed. "We will keep fighting and holding federal officials accountable."
Climate and rights groups filed the legal petition in January 2022, as Common Dreams reported at the time. After the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) ignored the document for months, the organizations sued to compel a response in April.
In a reply released Thursday, Laura Daniel-Davis, principal deputy assistant secretary of land and mineral management at DOI, wrote that "I have considered your petition and have decided not to initiate the rulemaking you requested for the reasons discussed in this letter because the department has a robust rulemaking agenda already underway to address the climate crisis and implement reforms to our conventional energy programs, and has insufficient resources to undertake the proposed rulemaking at this time."
After detailing some of the department and administrative efforts underway, including under the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed last year, Daniel-Davis noted that "although your petition also sets out legal and scientific analyses to support the proposed rulemaking, I will not address those arguments here given the decision to deny the petition based on the competing priorities detailed above."
"I appreciate the thought and effort behind your petition," she concluded. "This administration shares your concerns regarding the urgency of the climate crisis and is directing its limited resources in an effort to address them."
Campaigners from groups behind the petition challenged Daniel-Davis' claims and accused the administration of serving Big Oil.
"To claim that the Biden administration doesn't have the resources to take real climate action on federal fossil fuels is vacuous and beyond hypocritical."
"Leaving the fossil fuel industry in control of the oil and gas spigot is an appalling abdication of climate leadership on public lands," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. "To claim that the Biden administration doesn't have the resources to take real climate action on federal fossil fuels is vacuous and beyond hypocritical."
"This is the definition of lip service," McKinnon continued. "The administration acknowledges the urgency to address climate change and meanwhile avoids every opportunity to take meaningful action on the fossil fuels under its control."
Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians, was similarly frustrated, charging that "the Department of the Interior continues to bend over backward to accommodate the fossil fuel industry."
"If the department would actually take comprehensive and meaningful steps to aid our nation's transition away from oil, gas, and coal, and truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it would save them time and money and help spare this country the costly consequences of climate change," Nichols added.
The DOI letter and activists' frustration over it come as the Biden administration continues oil and gas lease sales on federal lands. This week's sale for 116 parcels totaling over 127,000 acres in Wyoming followed the federal government holding auctions for land in Kansas, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma since late May.
Critics have highlighted that despite Biden's campaign promises to ban new oil and gas leasing for public lands and waters, his administration approved over 6,400 permits in its first two years, more than the same period for the previous administration.
"The Biden administration should be swiftly ending the era of fossil fuels, not expanding new drilling and dirty infrastructure," said Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth, in a Thursday statement.
"By continuing to sacrifice our public lands and approve enormous fossil fuel projects, President Biden is poisoning communities and throwing his so-called 'climate presidency' out the window," she asserted. "Biden must immediately cancel these lease sales and reverse our rapid descent into irreparable climate catastrophe."
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