In direct violation of warnings issued by the International Energy AgencyThe development of new oil, coal, and gas should have ceased by 2021. by UN Secretary General António Guterres that government support for fossil fuel production is “delusional,” the federal U.S. government closed out the second quarter of the year with thousands of acres of federal land on the auction block before oil and gas interests. Developers were able to access more than 70,000 acres of land in public trust in Colorado and Montana, Nevada, New Mexico North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Wyoming. $22 million — which advocates say is a paltry sum when compared with the billions of dollarsThe climate crisis is expected to cost approximately $1 billion annually if oil and gas are extracted from federal lands.
The transaction takes place at the tail end a month. one-third of the U.S. was urged to stay indoors amid record-breaking heat, and risks bringing more oil and gas production — a top contributorto greenhouse gas emissions and one most water-intensive industries — to some of the hottestAnd most water-stressed areasThe U.S.
Legal advocates said that it is not clear if oil and gas will be extracted from the earth on these parcels. Truthout. Unlike other existential blows that came earlier the same week, such as the Supreme Court’s ruling on West Virginia v. EPA, which limited the agency’s authority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the decision to undergo sales on federal lands was fully within the administration’s powers to prevent, or delay, and remains in its power to reverse. According to the latest pollingOn the subject, the majority of Americans are against drilling on federal lands.
The bids for the parcels were made insipidly the same day that the Supreme Court issued its decision. West Virginia v. EPA, on a websiteFederal and state agencies contract with each other for sales management. Anonymous bids were received every few minutes at a cost of a few dollars, starting at $2 per acre. “Bidder #426,” for instance, walked away with access to 320 acresPermian basinin at $1.901 per acre The parcel is located on the former site of the Permian Basin. Mescalero ApacheAccording to the Indigenous land mapping tool (ILM), land before colonization Native Land. Other parcels were sold at a minimum bid of $2/acre. 585 acresPowder River County in Montana, on land that was once owned by the Northern Cheyenne Arapaho tribes. Representatives of the Mescalero Indian, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribal governments didn’t respond to press requests for comment about the oil and gas lease sale.
Despite all predictions industry representatives, Republican officials mainstream newsOutlets that would allow more production on federal land would receive a flood of offers and help lower gas prices. However, sales seem to have been slow, Nicole Ghio, manager of the fossil fuels program at, said. Friends of the Earth, told Truthout. “There’s this idea that these lease sales are going to generate this huge amount of [supply and] revenue, but they actually, relatively speaking, don’t.”
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), authorized to lease thousands of acres received no bidsMelissa Hornbein (senior attorney at The Advocate) said that they were made available for non-competitive sale during the auction. Western Environmental Law Center. Oil and gas developers that may have been lurking at the auction edge can now purchase leases at a price of $2 per acre. “The entire federal program is structured so as to maximize return for industry without accurately accounting for the environmental impact or the ways in which such practices monopolize federal public land that would otherwise be available for other purposes,” Hornbein told Truthout.
Seneca Johnson (a 20-year old leader with the AIDS Foundation), will be participating in this summer’s Summer Olympics. Youth United for Climate Action (YUCCA), who is from the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma but lives in New Mexico, has been coping with the worst fires she’s seen in her life. “The loss of the trees, the wildlife — we’re taught that they’re our relatives. And seeing these whole ecosystems and centuries of place and memory be burned away has been really hard,” she told Truthout, of witnessing the two worst fires in the state’s history happening simultaneously. There was also President Biden’s visit amid the smoke. he did not once mention climate change in a briefing on the fires, the lease sales felt like a “slap in the face.” In New Mexico, climate change has “hit every sector of our life,” Johnson said. According to the United States Geological Survey fossil fuel emissions on federal lands account approximately for one quarterof all greenhouse gas emission in the United States.
Johnson and legal advocates feel that the entire process leading up the BLM sale felt like it was happening behind closed doors. The legal tug-of war over the leasing moratorium began in 2006. over a dozen Republican attorneys general oil majorsIn early 2021, the Biden administration was sued. A decisionA Louisiana judge tried to block efforts to account climate impacts in leasing sales decisions. The unexpected result was that further delayingLeasing activity has increased. The Interior Department was indicted by a federal judge in April. announcedIt would resume oil and gas leases onshore, noting, however that it would reduce total parcels up for sale by 80 percent and charge oil & gas developers a higher rate.
The delay has also resulted, in part, from added rigor in the Department of Interior’s environmental review process, which, for the very first time, included an analysis of the “social cost” of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the sales. The Carbon’s social costThis long-debated economic concept allows policy makers to account the cost of responding the human-caused climate changes. It includes treating related health conditions and flooding caused by rising sea levels. The Biden administration uses $51 per ton of carbon dioxide to estimate these costs, up from the Trump administration’s Estimates from $1 to $7. In spite of the BLM’s use of the concept to analyze the impacts of its green-lighting the lease sale, which environmental groups praised, Ghio told Truthout, “it doesn’t appear that they actually took that into account in their decision making.”
BLM released a statement on June 29, the day before the lease sale. Finding of No Significant ImpactFONSI (for Wyoming leases) is a standard government document explaining why a given project has not been found not to have significant impacts on the environment and that it does not need further review. The agency determined that in spite of the proposed action potentially resulting in $357 million to $4 billion in social cost over the 30-year leases, BLM had undertaken those calculations “for informational purposes only,” and “ha[d] not determined to lease individual parcels, or not, based on greenhouse gas emissions.” According to the agency’s own analysis, earnings from the lease sales brought in dramatically less for the year than the cost of climate change they may contribute to causing. Wyoming was an example of this. $12 millionIt is estimated that it will cost society $137 million annually.
Johnson states that beyond the sky-high numbers Johnson believes no economic analysis can accurately reflect the true gravity associated with continuing to produce fossil fuels. According to Johnson’s experience in New Mexico, this has led to more asthma, premature deaths, wells on tribal lands running dry, and generations of farmers being told that they cannot grow. “It’s asking people to change their whole way of life. These things aren’t quantifiable.”
When asked about its lackluster calculation of the social cost and environmental justice effects of its sale, a response to protests over the New Mexico lease sales stated: “The BLM received no comments during the public comment period from individuals or Tribal affiliates expressing [environmental justice] related concerns with the parcels to be offered.”
New Mexico’s largest wildfire has caused activists, including youth and Indigenous groups to have their hands full. the U.S. Forest Service caused. “We are seeing our ancestral lands burn because of mismanagement by institutions that stole our lands from us from the very beginning,” Trenton DeVore, a 20-year-old activist from the Pueblo of Walatowa said at a June rallyPueblo Action Alliance and YUCCA organized the event. It was meant to raise awareness about the connection between state fires and oil and gas leasing. Johnson’s group YUCCAThe campaign is focusing on the upcoming election season, raising awareness about greenwashing and false solutions such as carbon capture and storage, which are both pushed hard by the oil and gas industry to continue production.
Legal advocates have been busy assembling a tapestry containing lawsuits. One, brought by 10 environmental and conservation groups, challenges all new leasing on the grounds that the Interior Department and BLM are failing to uphold their responsibility under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which requires the Interior Department to prevent “permanent impairment” and “unnecessary or undue degradation” of public lands from oil and gas development. AnotherThe other suit was filed the same day. It claims that the federal government did not address the impacts on groundwater and wildlife in its decision making to place Wyoming parcels up for bidding. It is possible that the sales could be canceled if either suit is successful. It is difficult to bring a lawsuit on grounds of human rights concerns that could adversely affect Indigenous peoples, rural people, and communities of color. The U.S. lacks an effective, comprehensive environmental justice law comparable to the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
Other grassroots efforts include legislative pushes for state and local laws that would prohibit leasing in areas where temperatures have already risen above what climate scientists consider the upper limit of global warming. This is to prevent the worst effects of the climate crisis. “At a minimum, lands that have already warmed 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) should be categorically ineligible for leasing,” Natasha Léger, interim director for Citizens for a Healthy Community, told Truthout, pointing out the fact that there are counties in which leases were just sold in Colorado, including Jackson, Moffat and Rio Blanco counties, have already experienced warming of 1.6, 2.1 and 2.4°C, respectively.
Legal advocates are impressed by the breadth of options available to the Biden administration. The administration could declare a climate crisis and then engage in rulemaking to enforce statutory requirements that prevent unduel and unnecessary degradation of land on validly issued leases. Or, the administration could stop issuing permits to drill on public land. This is what the highest bidders for these leases must obtain before extraction can begin.
“This does not have to be the final answer,” said Ghio. “And we’re certainly committed to making sure it’s not the final answer.”
