Environmentalists grow impatient with Biden as federal oil development outpaces Trump

(CN) — Amid a week of failure, recrimination and justification, President Joe Biden found yet another loyal constituency complaining that his administration has failed to live up to his campaign promises — environmentalists. 

The Center for Biological Diversity, a wildlife advocacy group, lashed out Friday, saying new data made available by the federal government shows that the Biden administration has approved nearly twice the amount of oil and gas leases on federal lands than the Trump administration had in its first year in office. 

The Biden administration approved 3,557 permits during its first full year in office, according to the report, significantly outpacing the 2,658 permits the Trump administration greenlighted during Donald Trump’s first year in office. 

“Biden’s runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires ending new fossil fuel extraction, but Biden is racing in the opposite direction.”

A group called Build Back Fossil Free noted that Biden promised the American people during his campaign that he would end oil and gas development on federal lands. 

“To regain credibility in the eyes of the world, President Biden must fulfill his promises to act on climate and environmental justice by stopping fossil fuel projects and declaring a climate emergency,” the group said in a recent release. 

Several groups signed a petition this week calling on Biden to craft an executive order calling for the elimination of oil and gas development on federal lands by 2035. 

“Right now, fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters make up a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions — at a time scientists are saying we must move urgently to cut emissions by at least half,” said Dan Ritzman, director of Sierra Club’s Lands, Water, Wildlife program. “Not only does it devastate our planet, it’s a handout to Big Oil at the expense of average Americans, who will bear the brunt of its societal, health, and financial ramifications.”

While the impetus to lay blame at the feet of Biden, whose approval ratings are in the tank as he has faced difficulty and obstruction in passing his agenda from both Republicans and members of his own party, indications are that the Biden administration has tried to curtail oil and gas development on federal lands, but have met with legal obstacles. 

In his first week in office, Biden issued an executive order of the type environmental organizations are demanding. The order called for the Bureau of Land Management to pause all oil and gas leases on federal lands along with a litany of other measures intended to curb greenhouse gas emissions. 

But 13 states and a coalition of oil and gas industry trade groups won a preliminary injunction in June, preventing Biden from implementing the policy. The preliminary injunction was awarded by a federal district judge in Louisiana, who was an appointee of the Trump administration. 

Biden has met with other difficulties along climate lines during his first year of office. Rising gas prices, which most economists attribute to spiking demand as America emerges from the pandemic, have provided Republican lawmakers with plenty of fodder to claim Biden’s climate agenda is hurting average Americans in the pocketbook. 

“Americans are paying more in Biden’s America,” Kevin McCarthy said this summer, during the surge in gas prices. “The cost of gasoline has surged to the highest price since 2014, a time when Biden was last serving in office.”

But most economists agree the connection between Biden’s policies and price increases are tenuous at best. And climate advocates say that while Biden has continued to show a commitment to transitioning America’s energy portfolio to more renewable sources of energy, he has failed to realize the implications of allowing the continued mass use of fossil fuels. 

Analyses show that curtailing the use of fossil fuels will be the single largest contributor to meeting goals set forth by the Paris Agreement, where the world governments pledged to do what is necessary to keep global warming within a 1.5 degree Celsius increase. 

Environmentalists also note that the Department of Interior report released in November and which comprehensively looked at oil and gas leasing on federal lands, focused more on royalties and bidding processes while ignoring climate. 

“We cannot fight climate change while ignoring the fact that nearly a quarter of U.S. climate emissions come from fossil fuel extraction on public lands,’ said Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth. “It's time for President Biden to become the climate leader he claims to be and phase out fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters.”

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