The Biden administration today offered more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for new oil and gas lease. The move contradicts President Biden’s global commitments and promises to act on the climate.
Earthjustice has active litigation aimed at preventing the sale from becoming effective, offering a final line of defense against this dangerous commitment to decades of greenhouse gas emissions.
The litigation is part of a global campaign urging the Biden administration to stop the sale. This campaign includes:
Allowing more oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is bad for the climate, wildlife, and communities.
- The oil industry, with the green light from the federal government, has for too long treated the Gulf of Mexico as an area of sacrifice. The move calls for more destruction and disaster for Gulf Coast communities already suffering from rising temperatures, flooding and pollution.
- Under-regulated oil and gas development puts Gulf Coast communities, coastal economies and marine life at risk. Affected species include sea turtles, dolphins, oysters and whales, including Rice’s Whale, which is only found in the Gulf of Mexico and is one of the most endangered whales in the world. planet.
- President Biden acknowledged that we are facing a “deep climate crisis” and that there is little time left for us to take bold action to avoid the most catastrophic impacts. Yet his administration has determined that a United Nations report that warned climate change was becoming a cataclysmic problem “does not have sufficient cause” to revise an existing environmental scan of that lease sale.
Earthjustice has filed a federal lawsuit to hold the government accountable for science and its legitimate duty to people and the planet.
- Officials violated federal law based on a flawed and outdated 2017 environmental scan. Since then, important information has emerged about the severity of the climate crisis. The administration is legally bound to assess this information before taking any action.
- The Biden administration used the same flawed analysis weeks earlier in a case involving a massive oil and gas project in the western Arctic. But Earthjustice held on and shut them down in court.
- On August 31, we filed a complaint against Home Secretary Deb Haaland and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management following Notice of Lease Sale 257. We represent Healthy Gulf, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and Center for Biological Diversity.
- The case will be fully informed by mid-December, and Earthjustice is asking for a ruling before the leases go into effect.
- We will continue to use all the tools at our disposal to stop this rental sale. Earthjustice’s goal is to end the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels.
Sign this letter to President Biden and Home Secretary Haaland to overhaul the federal fossil fuel program and end the new lease of fossil fuels.
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