Why Is President Biden Still Issuing Drilling and Exploration Leases to Fossil Fuel Companies?

In the past week, the American President, once again, issued exploration permits to fossil fuel companies to look for oil and gas on U.S. federal lands and offshore. This is the same president who has sponsored bills that commit hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and incentives to wean the country off its addiction to petroleum products, and the same one that has committed to a net-zero emissions target for the country by mid-century.

In the past week, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, another state that is committed to net-zero emissions by 2050, rolled back target milestone dates for electrification of transportation and housing. This was accompanied by new permit announcements to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea.

What is the rationale for giving fossil fuel companies permits to continue to drill when you are committed to ending fossil fuel dependence? The administration in the U.S. and governments of other Global North countries tell their citizens that oil and gas will still be needed during the energy transition even while their nations are going over to electrification in transportation, manufacturing, housing and infrastructure, and other economic sectors.

There is no doubt that our embracing of fossil fuels created our modern connected and high-speed world. Fossil fuels have revolutionized entire industries, and transportation, and helped the modern agricultural revolution. But the unintended consequences of our dependency on coal, petroleum and natural gas are changing the composition of the atmosphere by increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in it and leading to rising global temperatures over land and water.

A spokesperson for Greenpeace, an environmental advocacy group, stated, “75,000 people did not flood the streets of New York last weekend to see President Biden give Big Oil another hall pass to wreak havoc on our planet.” Nor did the protestors that have come out on streets across the UK register their opposition to what they perceive to be bad environmental policy.

Meanwhile, the scientific evidence continues to mount to support the “wreaking havoc” statement. There are a growing number of climate consequences that we are already witnessing in this ongoing global tragedy.

Climatologists are not weather forecasters. They are not the meteorologist or weatherperson who shows up in nightly newscasts on television. They are bonafide scientists who collect billions of data points from around the world. They are behind the deployment of climate sensors on land and oceans, mountain glaciers and deserts to use the data to build increasingly precise climate models. From the earliest of these models to the present ones, the alarm that has been sounded predicts that we are witnessing a global shift in the climate.

This year has presented us with evidence of that shift. We have witnessed the largest wildfire outbreaks on record, debilitating droughts, record heatwaves, intense precipitation events, flash floods, rapid growth in cyclonic storms producing wind levels rarely seen, floods that have devastated agriculture and communities, and weather-related deaths on an unprecedented scale.

The one message the scientific community continues to state is that the warming will continue with worsening climate consequences. And the climate activists like Greenpeace and others are heeding that message and gathering in the thousands to not just protest, but to begin to adopt civil disobedience strategies and more to get governments to act.

When the United Nations met in New York for Climate Week this month, the 75,000 referred to in the previous quote were out on the city’s streets with more than 100 arrested when they blockaded the entrances to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York accusing it of financing fossil fuel companies.

U.S. congressperson from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told recent climate marchers that they need to be “too big and too radical to ignore.” A Greenpeace reaction to Biden’s new lease permits included this quote, “To put us on a path to climate sanity, we cannot afford any new fossil fuel leases and infrastructure, period.” Even the science community is moving to more forceful advocacy with many calling for civil disobedience to obstruct fossil fuel operations, call out and expose those who finance them, and government enablers. A spokesperson for the advocacy group, Just Stop Oil, describes the rising civil disobedience as both “the last chance” and “our last hope.”

Pushing against the science and the growing numbers joining the civil disobedience movement, are denialists who come from the fossil fuel industry, conservative think tanks and political operatives within and without government. The denialists discredit the scientists who publish the scientific papers on climate change. Their agendas vary from being shameless shills for oil companies to political opportunists who prey on the general lack of public understanding of the science.

And if their denials don’t work, then they employ the four Ds, delay, deflect, divide and doom. They pander to subsets of those who gather to protest the causes of climate change. They tell us we can have our cake and eat it too by coming up with geoengineering and carbon capture technologies that will allow us to continue to extract oil and gas and mine coal to our hearts’ content. They don’t tell the public that the technologies are expensive, unproven, and will require tax dollars to be spent because the extractors are too risk-averse to spend only their money on these projects.

The final D, doom is the last weapon in denialist arguments. The argument is we are too late so we are doomed and should just give up trying. We either adapt or die and point to the geological record for evidence of past mass extinctions. They talk about this D as if it were natural rather than one we are imposing on ourselves.