The House passed a bill Tuesday aimed at improving oil and gas lease sales by making the process completely web-based, which climate change activists argue is a back-handed way of denying them access.
The legislation directs the Interior Department to transition the entire system it uses to sell offshore drilling leases to energy companies to the Internet.
The bipartisan bill was the first energy-related legislation to be taken up by the chamber after the month-long August recess. It passed by voice vote on the House floor with no objections.
One of sponsors of the bipartisan “Innovation in Offshore Leasing Act,” Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana, said the bill “simply puts it online. It simply allows for better access to information,” he said, alluding to activists’ claims that the bill is meant to push them out of the discussion.
“This bill brings much needed modernization to our antiquated offshore leasing processes,” despite the Obama administration’s desire to eliminate all offshore drilling, said Natural Resources Committee chief Rob Bishop, R-Utah.
“Even though the current administration seeks to eliminate all of the Outer Continental Shelf from exploration,” what is available for drilling under the Interior Department’s “restrictive” five-year energy plan “will benefit immensely from [the bill’s] innovative framework,” Bishop said, while defying environmentalists’ claims. “Despite what fringe-left special interests keep saying, this bipartisan bill expands both public access and transparency,” he said.
The groups protesting the lease sales are part of the increasingly vocal “keep it in the ground” movement, which seek to stop all fossil fuel production in the U.S. to avoid the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. However, it’s not a cause that the administration has been too keen to support.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell called the activists “naive” earlier in the year, and the agency decided to voluntarily begin moving to an Internet-based auction system ahead of the bill’s passage due in part to disruptions caused by activists.
The Interior Department decided to hold its first online lease sale last month as a means of increasing transparency, but also to reduce disruptions from protesters that attempted to shutdown prior public lease sales.
Interior officials have said the agency provides plenty of time for groups to raise their concerns at separate public meetings well in advance of the lease sales.
“Making government work better for people — the way it’s supposed to — is a primary goal in everything we do up here, and this bill is designed with that in mind,” Graves added.
