US puts Italy-sized chunk of Gulf of Mexico up for auction for oil drilling
In latest blow to Joe Biden’s reputation as the ‘climate president’, 73.3m
acres of the gulf will be offered for fossil fuel extraction
An enormous swathe of the Gulf of Mexico, spanning an area the size of Italy,
was put up for auction on Wednesday for oil and gas drilling, in the latest
blow to Joe Biden’s increasingly frayed reputation on dealing with the climate
crisis.
The president’s Department of the Interior offered up a vast area of the
central and western Gulf, including plunging deep water reaches, for drilling
projects that will stretch out over decades, despite scientists’ urgent
warnings that fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out if the world is to avoid
disastrous global heating. The auctions also come despite Biden’s own pre-
election promise to halt all drilling on federal lands and waters.
A total of 313 tracts of ocean, spanning 1.6m acres, received high bids during
the auction, the administration announced on Wednesday afternoon. There
were 32 fossil fuel companies involved in the auction, collectively bidding
$309.7m for drilling rights. The amount offered by the federal government
was much larger than this, however. The bids will be evaluated by the
government in the coming months before leases are issued.
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In all, 73.3m acres (30m hectares), an area roughly the size of Italy, was
made available to drilling companies, less than a month before the 13th
anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. The sale, known as
lease 259, had the potential to extract more than 1bn barrels of oil and 4.4tn
cubic feet of gas over the next 50 years, according to the US federal
government.
The auctions come just two weeks after Biden’s administration approved the
controversial Willow project, a drilling endeavor in the remote tundra of
Alaska’s arctic that will remove more than 600m barrels of oil over its lifetime,
and the two actions have caused major alarm among those in favor of a
livable climate, including Biden’s usual allies.
“For the first half of his presidency, Joe Biden led on climate with
transformative vision but in the second half he seems to be signaling a
disastrous climate U-turn,” Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club
and a prominent progressive, said.
Last summer, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (or IRA), a landmark
bill that the president lauded as the “biggest step forward on climate ever”.
The sweeping legislation has billions of dollars in support for renewable
energy projects and electric car subsidies, but it also included stipulations
that large areas of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska be made available for fossil
fuel drilling in order to appease Joe Manchin, a pro-coal Democratic senator
and key swing vote.
Climate campaigners mostly considered the trade-off to be worthwhile as
the resulting emissions cuts should still be large, but the new glut of drilling
could wipe out much of the benefits of wind and solar projects over the next
decade.
“If this continues, all of the good Biden has done for the future will be undone
by Biden himself,” said Jealous.
“If he’s making a political calculation, he’s making a wrong one. He’s breaking
a major promise on drilling and by going back on his word he will inspire
many young people to stay at home rather than voting in 2024. His decisions
appear to be rooted in the political and economic calculus of the last century,
not this one.”
The White House has pointed to a series of complicating factors to its
climate agenda, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has sped up the
construction of oil and gas export terminals in the US, bound for European
allies, as well as a closely divided Congress and various legal obstacles.
On Friday, Biden said that he was inclined to block the Willow project, only to
be told by administration lawyers that ConocoPhillips, the owner of the
project lease, would likely sue and win to secure it. “My strong inclination was
to disapprove of it across the board but the advice I got from counsel was
that if that were the case, I may very well lose,” the president said.
The administration has also indicated that the terms of the Inflation
Reduction Act also compel the Gulf of Mexico sales, although opponents
argue that such a large area did not need to be put up for sale.
A separate, even larger, tract of the gulf, known as lease 257, has been
enmeshed in a legal battle and the latest lease blocks will also likely end up in
court, with a coalition of green groups suing this month to stop it. It’s not
been clear how much interest there will be from industry – an auction of
leases in December for the Cook Inlet in Alaska yielded just one bid.
“These leases were brought back to life by the IRA but there was no legal
reason to offer almost the entire Gulf of Mexico to the oil and gas industry,”
said George Torgun, an attorney at Earthjustice, which claims the drilling,
aside from its climate impacts, will further burden communities of color who
live beside polluting refineries along the coast and endanger the Rice’s
whale, a species endemic to the gulf with fewer than 50 individuals
remaining.
“This is locking in decades of fossil fuel use when we should be heading in
another direction,” said Torgun. “It’s out of step with what Biden himself has
called the existential threat of climate change.”
The department of interior’s bureau of ocean energy management, which is
overseeing the lease sales, did not respond to a request for comment. The
National Ocean Industries Association, a lobby group for offshore drillers, has
said that allowing the leases provides a “key component of a national energy
strategy that will ensure Americans can continue to have access to
fundamental domestic energy that is produced safely, sustainably, and
responsibly”.
The Earth’s climate system is uncompromising, however. The recent
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned that 3
billion people around the world are already suffering from severe climate
impacts and that the world’s temperature will likely rise beyond 1.5C,
unleashing much worse misery, within a decade if fossil fuels aren’t radically
pared back.
“The truth is Earth doesn’t care about politics, it cares about greenhouse
gases in atmosphere,” said Alex Ruane, a Nasa climate scientist and lead
IPCC author.
“Even since the last IPCC report in 2021 we have put a substantial chunk of
the carbon budget into the atmosphere. Action and inaction are both choices
and at present we are getting closer every day to those temperature targets.”
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