The next wave of green activism is focused on the Gulf of Mexico

By Ella Nilsen, CNN

The Biden administration will open up Wednesday around 73 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for auction to the oil and gas industry, the second massive lease sale this year and its last one scheduled until 2025.

A common occurrence under both the Trump and Obama administrations, these auctions have become a hotly contested and highly litigated flash point under President Joe Biden.

Biden vowed to halt drilling on federal lands and in federal waters as a 2020 presidential candidate, before a series of lawsuits reversed a drilling pause his administration put in place. And the Inflation Reduction Act tied oil and gas lease sales to ones for offshore wind, making part of Biden’s climate agenda impossible to achieve without hanging on to oil and gas drilling.

Biden has overseen a clean energy boom, top White House economic and climate officials said Tuesday. Figures provided by the White House showed investment in construction of manufacturing facilities made the largest contribution to GDP growth since the Bureau of Economic Analysis started tracking data around six decades ago, with $628 billion of clean energy and manufacturing investments announced in the United States under Biden.

“Investment in climate and clean energy outpaces overall investment, which has been very strong,” Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, told reporters on Tuesday.

But Biden has also presided over new highs in oil production: US oil exports reached a new record this year, even surpassing exports under former President Donald Trump. Some climate activists are warning this dynamic could endanger the president with young voters ahead of the 2024 election.

“These drilling projects make a massive impact on our ability to phase out fossil fuels at the scale required,” Michele Weindling, Sunrise political director, told CNN. “What we’re watching is the administration continue to lose credibility with young voters when Biden tries to walk in both lanes.”

As 2023 draws to a close, activists and environmental groups are increasingly focused on the Gulf of Mexico – where most US offshore drilling is concentrated. The area could also become home to a massive proposed liquified natural gas project known as CP2, shipping US gas to foreign nations.

White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi told reporters that Biden has “taken on the (climate) crisis as young people insisted” by “delivering not only jobs, but also justice.”

“If the question is ‘why do young people want more,’ we just need to look at the science” of climate change, Zaidi said. “There’s a relentlessness embedded in the shot clock for climate action.”

White House officials were pressed on how major new clean energy investments square with the fact that US oil production also hit record levels this year – a fact that is at odds with Biden’s climate goals.

“The US has been continuing to expand a variety of forms of energy production,” Zaidi said. “We need to, as part of our overall climate approach, transition globally away from fossil fuels.”

A contentious lease sale

Wednesday’s oil and gas lease sale was delayed for months over the discovery of the Rice’s whale, a new and endangered species of whale in the Gulf of Mexico.

After the whale was found in the Gulf about two years ago, the Biden Interior Department initially sought to curtail the size of its oil and gas lease sale as an attempt to protect the whale’s habitat and implement slower boat speeds in certain areas of the Gulf. But after losing in court, the original acreage of 73 million acres was reinstated.

The Gulf of Mexico is the epicenter of America’s offshore oil and gas industry. It is also polluting at much higher rates than previously thought, according to scientific research from the University of Michigan. Researchers found the climate impact of oil and gas drilling was twice as large as official government estimates, driven by high levels of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in its first two decades in the atmosphere. Methane is the primary ingredient of natural gas.

Environmental groups are pushing ahead with attempts to stop this and a similar lease sale held in March. Even though the Inflation Reduction Act ties oil and gas auctions to offshore wind lease sales, environmental lawyers argue the vast acreage could be changed by the Biden administration.

There’s “certainly nothing in there that required a lease sale of this magnitude in the gulf,” George Torgun, a senior attorney at environmental law group Earthjustice, told CNN. “We’re continuing to lock in fossil fuel production for several decades to come, which as we know is the exact opposite of what we should be doing.”

Environmental groups in the Gulf and nationally are also pushing for the Biden administration to not approve future export terminals to export America’s abundant liquified natural gas to foreign nations, arguing it drives up US emissions for decades to come.

“It’s important that we start transitioning away from this dirty energy economy in general,” Raleigh Hoke, campaigns director for advocacy group Healthy Gulf, told CNN. “Despite what the industry says, methane gas is a dirty energy source.”

Torgun said the historic heatwaves scorching waters in the Atlantic Ocean have been cited in the group’s legal briefs opposing more oil and gas drilling.

“It certainly has colored our complaint following quite an eventful summer throughout the US,” Torgun said. “It was quite a record-breaking summer for climate in the US and the world.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.