Know the facts, don’t just assume the usual media outlets will accurately inform you…..”A stockpile of federal oil and gas leases across an Ohio-sized swath of land in the West shows the fossil fuel industry was preparing for a leasing moratorium for years, former Interior Department officials say.
President Joe Biden imposed what he described as a “pause” on federal oil and gas leasing on Wednesday as part of his climate policy—while allowing millions of acres of existing leases to remain unaffected. Nevertheless, industry representatives and elected officials in the West lambasted the move, saying it’ll deprive Western states of much-needed income for basic state services.
But the industry’s “huge inventory” of undeveloped existing leases and drilling permits are evidence that the oil and gas industry anticipated a “pause” in leasing long ago, said John Leshy, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings and former Interior solicitor in the Clinton administration.
That “makes the ‘sky is falling’ rhetoric from the industry and its allies a bit over the top,” Leshy said Thursday. “Especially since many of the Trump-era lease offerings attracted no bids, or only minimum bids.”
Oil and gas production was occurring on less than half of the more than 26 million acres of land already under a federal lease by the end of fiscal 2019, according to the most recent federal Bureau of Land Management data, which doesn’t include millions of acres leased in the Trump administration’s final year.
Energy companies have the right to drill federal oil and gas leases for 10 years, and many of the leases sold over the last year were auctioned by the land bureau for as little as $2 per acre. The land bureau didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday.”
A Reasonable Point of View 