Frank Macchiarola, a senior vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, said in a statement the Biden administration is sending mixed signals by releasing emergency oil reserves and then proposing to raise costs for the industry. It suggests the administration has “no clear roadmap for the future of federal leasing,” he said.
Meanwhile, environmentalists said they were concerned that the Biden administration was backtracking on a central climate pledge.
Brett Hartl, director of government affairs for the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity, called the 18-page report a “massive betrayal” of the president on climate change.
Mr. Hartl said environmental groups had expected the agency to review the fossil fuel leasing program, taking into account the environmental harms of drilling at the local level as well its contribution to the global climate crisis. He said the report, which barely mentioned climate change, “isn’t worth the paper it was written on.”
As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised to stop issuing new leases for drilling on public lands. “And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period,” Mr. Biden told voters in New Hampshire in February 2020.
This month, he appeared at a global climate summit meeting in Glasgow to urge other world leaders to take bold action to cut emissions from oil, gas and coal. Mr. Biden has pledged to cut United States greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is a former environmental activist and former member of Congress who had a campaign website that included this quote from her: “We need to act fast to counteract climate change and keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
But last week, the Biden administration offered up to 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for drilling leases — the largest sale since 2017. The administration was legally obligated to hold the lease sales after Republican attorneys general from 13 states successfully overturned a suspension on sales that Mr. Biden had tried to impose. Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil offered $192 million for the rights to drill in the area offered by the government.