NEW ORLEANS (CN) — The largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history takes place Wednesday for 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, just days after President Joe Biden pledged during a United Nations climate summit to reduce fossil fuel emissions to curb wider devastation from climate change.
The lease auction also comes as the Gulf continues to reel following hundreds of oil spills offshore during Hurricane Ida.
“It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous, hypocritical action in the aftermath of the climate summit,” a director with the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement this week.
The conservation group was one of four to sue the Biden administration in August, when Wednesday's lease sale was added to the calendar following a moratorium on new development that Biden imposed when he came into office last January.
The White House says it is forced to conduct the auction after a Louisiana federal judge struck down the president’s executive order calling for a pause in drilling across federal lands and waters.
“The administration has made clear that it disagrees with the ruling and the Department of Justice has appealed it, but the government must comply with it in the meantime,” White House spokesman Vedant Patel told the HuffPost.
During a presidential debate in March 2020, Biden promised to “take on the fossil fuel industry” and rapidly transition the nation away from fossil fuels.
“No more subsidies for [the] fossil fuel industry,” the then-candidate said. “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”
Wednesday's sale follows COP26, the United Nations climate conference in Scotland that began earlier this month, where diplomats are on the verge of a deal that falls far below what scientists say is necessary to address catastrophic global warning. The current plan calls for a drastic cut in fossil fuel production and emissions by 2030 – something that is already being undercut by the oil lease sale because new leases take years to develop, meaning oil and gas production will likely only begin to ramp up as 2030 rolls around.
The Department of the Interior is conducting the sale through a livestreamed auction. It is the largest amount of acreage ever offered, bigger even than any sale under former President Donald Trump’s oil-friendly administration, which put 815,400 federal acres of water for sale in 2018 in what it touted at the time as being the largest oil lease sale ever.
By the Interior Department’s estimates, the current acreage could lead to an additional 1.1 billion barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over several decades.
Anne Rolfes, founder of the environmental group Louisiana Bucket Brigade, slammed the oil lease auction in an email to Courthouse News.
“All this energy going into fossil fuels is a scourge on our state. It’s not just that the drilling and greenhouse gases are harmful. It’s the tremendous opportunity cost of pursuing fossil fuels and missing the promise and potential of renewable energy,” she said.
Rolfes underscored the existing problems with oil spills in the Gulf.
“The oil industry can’t manage the rigs that it already has in the Gulf. Look no further than the 350+ oil spills during Hurricane Ida. And even without hurricanes, there are thousands of spills in the Gulf of Mexico every year. They have no business exploring for more when they can’t properly maintain their current operations,” Rolfes said.
Kristen Monsell, the oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the Biden administration is "lighting the fuse on a massive carbon bomb in the Gulf of Mexico."
“This will inevitably lead to more catastrophic oil spills, more toxic climate pollution, and more suffering for communities and wildlife along the Gulf Coast," she said in a statement. "Biden has the authority to stop this, but instead he’s casting his lot in with the fossil fuel industry and worsening the climate emergency.”
Last week, the administration proposed another round of oil and gas lease sales in 2022 for land in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and other western states. This comes even as the White House recently concluded that oil and gas sales worsen the impacts of climate change.
Just last week in Scotland, Biden told other world leaders that the U.S. is ready to lead on climate change. The president's pledge came as Congress bickered back home over a $550 billion climate change package his administration is trying to advance.
American promises to lead on climate change have been viewed with skepticism in light of Republican resistance to acknowledging global warming as an issue, as well as a history of U.S. presidents making emissions promises with little plan for execution.
This year’s climate conference was marked by large demonstrations led by youth activists, including Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, scientists and members of indigenous group who are dealing with the effects of climate change.
During a speech, Thunberg called the climate conference a failure. The summits, known as the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, take place every year. This one was called COP26 because it was the 26th meeting.
“It’s not a secret that COP26 is a failure,” Thunberg said. “The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”
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