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Record-high gas prices be damned, Biden admin cancels massive oil and gas lease

May 12, 2022 | | Print Article

The Biden administration has canceled a lease that would have granted gas and oil companies access to over one million acres of drillable land in Alaska’s Cook Inlet.

This stunning move, which comes amid a rapid uptick in gas prices, is “keeping with political promises President Joe Biden made in the name of halting global warming,” CBS News reported Wednesday, (emphasis added.)

This comes as nationwide gas prices hit an average of $4.40 per gallon Wednesday.

The Department of Interior issued a statement to CBS News attributing the lease’s cancellation to an alleged “lack of industry interest in leasing in the area.”

But that statement appeared to be yet another lie from this administration, as evidenced by the loud pushback from those within the oil and gas industry.

Frank J. Macchiarola, the senior vice president of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, described by CBS News as “the country’s largest oil and gas trade association,” slammed the cancellation as “another example of the administration’s lack of commitment to oil and gas development in the US.”

“The President has spoken about the need for additional supplies in the market, but his administration has failed to take action to match that rhetoric,” he said in a statement to CBS News, adding that there will be “negative consequences to shutting off oil and gas development, both politically and practically.”

“Unfortunately, this is becoming a pattern — the administration talks about the need for more supply and acts to restrict it. As geopolitical volatility and global energy prices continue to rise, we again urge the administration to end the uncertainty and immediately act on a new five-year program for federal offshore leasing,” he added.

Meanwhile, one of the Biden administration’s key constituents, radical environmentalists, are thrilled by the cancellation of the Cook Inlet lease.

“It’s good for the climate, which can’t handle new oil and gas development. It’s good for Cook Inlet, because offshore drilling is dangerous and disruptive. And it’s good for the people of Cook Inlet, including native people, who cherish the inlet in its natural state. So it’s a really good thing,” Drew Caputo, a top official with the group Earthjustice, said to CBS News.

CBS News notes that radical environmentalists like Caputo “argue the climate issue is too important to get caught up in political battles.”

“The scientists are telling us the time to shift from fossil fuel energy is not years from now. It’s today. We need to end offshore oil leasing,” Caputo said in his own words.

Conservatives disagree with this mindset. They argue that climate change is a long-term phenomenon that ought to be dealt with organically over time via human innovation, progress, and adaption, not government regulation and hypocritical virtue-signaling.

Liberals, meanwhile, act as if climate change is an imminent phenomenon that requires modern society to be completely remade from top to bottom.

According to CBS News, in addition to canceling the Cook Inlet lease, the Biden administration has also “halted two leases under consideration for the Gulf of Mexico,” allegedly because of “conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales.”

These moves, all of which have the potential to cause further upticks in gas prices, come only days after the Biden administration launched an Office of Environmental Justice to ameliorate the effects of so-called environmental racism.

So-called environmental justice is a left-wing invention that centers around the idea that pollution disproportionately affects minorities and is therefore racist and must be dealt with through federal regulation.

In March, for instance, the administration announced a new rule requiring that nitrogen oxide emissions from heavy trucks be cut by 90 percent within the next ten years because minorities are allegedly “more likely” to live near truck routes.

The problem with so-called environmental justice rules like the one announced in March is that, much like the cancellation of vital oil/gas leases, they come at the cost of  America’s economic health.

But as noted by CBS News, these moves are in “keeping with political promises” that the president made on the campaign trail.

And indeed, it seems that keeping these promises to radical environmentalists is all that matters to this administration.

As of the morning of May 12th, President Biden’s average job approval rating on the economy was 37.1 percent …

Vivek Saxena
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