Biden agrees to resume Trump's plans for national oil and gas production

Biden agrees to resume Trump’s plans for national oil and gas production. 

Washington: Following a court ruling this week that temporarily restored a policy supposed to integrate the cost of global warming into federal decision-making, the Biden administration announced on Friday that it would resume plans for oil and gas extraction on public lands.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the federal oil and gas leasing program has seen a series of halts and starts. 

During his presidential campaign, Biden promised to end federal drilling auctions. Still, his efforts have been thwarted by a legal challenge brought by Republican-led states.

A month ago, the Interior Department announced that it would postpone upcoming federal oil and gas lease sales after a Louisiana federal judge barred the administration from using its “social cost of carbon” value to factor climate change risks into permitting, investment, and regulatory decisions.

The government was then allowed to continue using the value of about $50 per tonne of greenhouse gases emitted by a federal appeals court earlier this week. 

Early last year, the White House reverted to an Obama-era value, significantly higher than the Trump administration’s about $10 per tonne.

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Interior spokesperson Melissa Schwartz said in an emailed statement, “With this ruling, the department continues its planning for prudent oil and gas development on America’s public lands and waterways.”

She refused to say whether oil and gas leasing auctions would be resumed shortly.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) planned lease sales in many Western states before the February verdict. 

Biden’s social cost of carbon was used in the environmental calculations for such sales.

The Western Energy Alliance, a trade group, said the transactions should now proceed.

“We have heard directly from BLM that the district court order led them to halt progress because they would have had to revise the study,” Kathleen Sgamma, President of the Alliance, stated in an email.