You are over-thinking it- as usual! Blaming Biden for things he is not responsible for. But, now that you brought it up- LET'S MAKE SOME SENSE OF THE REALITY OF IT- INSTEAD OF OVERTHUNKEDNESS!
On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden made a bold promise to ban oil and gas permitting on federally owned land. Then, just days after taking office, he laid down a federal leasing moratorium, part of a set of sweeping executive orders on climate change.
The pause would give the administration time “to review and reset the oil and gas leasing program,” Biden said at the time. How that program is run has big stakes for the climate; the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that roughly a quarter of all U.S. carbon emissions come from federal oil, gas, and coal extraction. The International Environmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear, burning those fossil fuels has caused dangerous global warming, and the window to avoid catastrophic consequences is closing fast.
And yet, the White House is on pace to hand out more oil and gas drilling permits this year than any under President Trump and the most since George W. Bush left the Oval Office. The boom, first reported by the Associated Press, undercuts the president’s climate agenda and infuriates environmentalists demanding more aggressive action. It also exposes what activists say are fundamental legal and bureaucratic problems in the federal fossil fuel program that predate Biden by decades.
To extract oil and gas from public land, a driller must first obtain a lease. Under federal law, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auctions off tracts, usually areas recommended by interested companies, and the highest bidder is awarded a 10-year lease. The January 27 moratorium temporarily stopped lease sales, but it did nothing about oil and gas development on more than 38 million acres of public lands and waters already stockpiled in existing leases—legal contracts that typically prove all but impossible to break.
Once a company owns a lease, it can file what is called an application for permits to drill. If the BLM determines that the proposed drilling complies with all environmental laws and regulations, the agency approves the application and issues a two-year drilling permit. Applications started pouring in last year as the world emerged from pandemic lockdown and energy demand soared. Biden’s election only ramped up that mad rush to lock in drilling rights as companies contemplated how far-reaching Biden’s clamp-down on oil and gas would be.
Applications started pouring in last year as the world emerged from pandemic lockdown and energy demand soared.
Because the moratorium Biden imposed a week after inauguration only halted new lease sales, drilling permit applications on already leased land have continued to roll in, spurred by still-climbing energy prices. Meanwhile, the BLM keeps approving them despite the White House changeover and rhetoric. As of August 1, more than 2,400 drilling permits have been issued since Biden took office on January 20- and thousands more since!
