The Biden administration, faced with a court order to resume federal oil and gas leasing, has resurrected a Trump-era plan to offer millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico that environmentalists describe as the largest offshore sale in U.S. history.
The Interior Department said Tuesday that it would publish a notice this month offering 80.8 million acres in the Gulf.
The department is revising the Trump administration‘s 79.7-million-acre plan, which was canceled shortly after President Biden took office as part of his “pause” on new oil and gas activity on federal lands and waters.
A coalition of climate organizations promptly sued in federal court to block the sale. The lawsuit said the order relied on “arbitrary environmental analyses” and cited the disconnect with Mr. Biden’s ambitious climate change agenda.
“President Biden’s administration has recognized that climate change presents immense harms and that bold, immediate actions are needed to achieve emission reductions and curb the climate emergency facing the globe,” said the lawsuit, filed by Earthjustice. “Despite this, the Biden administration’s Interior Department is holding Lease Sale 257.”
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimated that the sale would result in the production of up to 1.12 billion barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over a period of at least 50 years. The lawsuit said the production would “magnify greenhouse emissions worldwide.”
“The sale will offer over 80 million acres of public waters to the oil and gas industry, making it the largest offshore lease sale in U.S. history,” the complaint said.
The administration is moving forward with a sale it nixed just seven months ago to comply with U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s June order halting the leasing freeze pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by 13 states.
The Justice Department told the court last week that it would submit the Record of Decision for the lease sale by the end of August and publish the sale notice in September.
H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the free-market Heartland Institute, said the president was out of options.
“Nothing Biden could have done will make the environmentalists happy because the court, to be fair, didn’t give him much choice,” said Mr. Burnett. “He had to offer leases. That’s what the court was clear about because under the law, every few months, you’ve got to offer leases.”
Dusting off the Gulf of Mexico proposal, known as Lease Sale 257, made sense in that the Trump administration had already laid the groundwork, he said.
“He [Biden] has disobeyed the law for as long as he could. He’s got to do something. The easiest thing to do is bring one [sale] that Trump had basically already approved, so there’s no effort on his administration’s part,” said Mr. Burnett.
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Earthjustice just one of the groups of stupid Eco-Freaks who file stupid lawsuits and think its all right to make mistakes in enviromental ideas their as stupid a s Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and Center of Biological Diversity