A few weeks after allowing the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska to go forward, the Biden administration is auctioning off more than 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling.
On Wednesday, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will hold a lease sale for an area that’s more than double the size of Willow in acreage. The administration was forced to hold the sale after Joe Manchin added it to the Inflation Reduction Act, the major climate and energy bill that President Joe Biden signed last year.
Environmental groups have already filed a lawsuit to try to stop the lease sale, saying Interior’s environmental analysis is flawed. They also take issue with the size and scope of sale.
“There’s nothing in the IRA that required it to be so large,” said George Torgun, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental law group. “If it goes forward as planned, it’s double the size of Willow. It’s going to lock in fossil fuel development in the Gulf for the next 50 years.”
Earthjustice successfully sued to stop a similar project in the past. Last year, a federal judge invalidated an even larger Gulf oil and gas lease sale of 80 million acres, after finding that Interior’s environmental analysis didn’t adequately consider the climate impacts of adding millions of metric tons of planet-warming pollution to the atmosphere.
In its environmental analysis for the current lease sale, the Biden administration estimated the oil and gas drilling from this sale would emit about 21.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
An Interior Department spokesperson declined to comment on the sale.
“We’re really disappointed we didn’t see something lesser in scope, this is basically offering up most of the Gulf,” Torgun said. “It’s another massive…
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