The Interior Department said its oil and gas leasing program would be delayed after a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from using a tool that lets it estimate the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions.
The delay is the latest setback to the leasing program, which President Joe Biden campaigned against but has struggled to pause while in office. Republicans have blamed Biden’s efforts for rising oil and gas prices.
The tool in question, the “social costs of carbon” metric, is used in economic models to assign value to carbon dioxide emissions in order to help quantify the economic damage caused by climate change, such as more destructive hurricanes, extreme wildfire seasons, flooding, and sea-level rise.
The decision comes after Biden, on his first day in office, moved the social costs price back up to $51 per ton of emissions, where it was during the Obama administration. Under former President Donald Trump, the cost was substantially reduced, to $7 per ton.
Now, the Justice Department is asking U.S. District Judge James Cain, a Trump appointee in the Western District of Louisiana, to stay his ruling from earlier this month, arguing that it has been unduly disruptive to federal agency operations and that disruptions could compound “due to an inability to redo related environmental analyses in time to meet mandatory deadlines.”
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In a motion filed this weekend, DOJ lawyers argued that Cain’s injunction affects 21 rules the Department of Energy is working on, and also hits other federal agencies, such as Interior.
“The consequences of the injunction are dramatic,” the Biden administration alleged in its filing. “Pending rulemakings in separate agencies throughout the government — none of which were actually challenged here — will now be delayed. Other agency actions may now be abandoned due to an inability to redo related environmental analyses in time to meet mandatory deadlines.”
Earlier this month, the Interior Department said it expects delays with new oil and gas permitting and leasing because it has “assessed program components that incorporate the interim guidance on social cost of carbon analysis” that was blocked by the court, according to its court filing.
Biden campaigned on transitioning the country away from fossil fuels, and upon taking office, he took steps toward that goal, such as canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and pausing leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands, as well as sketching out plans for new environmental rules. So far, though, oil and gas production is up significantly during his tenure.
Biden pledged to end new drilling on federal lands and “transition away” from fossil fuels in hopes of reining in climate-changing emissions. But little more than a year after his administration announced a halt on new federal oil and gas leasing in the United States, court decisions and bureaucratic delays have undermined the pause, and the current administration has even surpassed Trump’s in issuing drilling permits on federal lands.
Last fall, the administration was forced to allow the sale of 1.7 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore oil and gas drilling, the largest lease sale in the nation’s history, before it was later invalidated by a federal judge in January.
Republicans have also faulted Biden’s promises to “transition away” from fossil fuels, saying such steps would endanger jobs and cause prices to skyrocket.
The Bureau of Land Management “had already incorporated the [higher per-ton value] into its NEPA analysis associated with several planned onshore oil and gas lease sales,” the Interior filing said. In the meantime, “work surrounding public-facing rules, grants, leases, permits and other projects has been delayed or stopped altogether so that agencies can assess whether and how they can proceed.”
“The Interior Department has assessed program components that incorporate the interim guidance on social cost of carbon analysis from the Interagency Working Group, and delays are expected in permitting and leasing for the oil and gas programs,” Interior spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said in a statement on Saturday.
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The lawsuit was brought by 10 Republican-led states. In his decision, Cain sided with the states, writing that the Biden administration’s updated carbon cost estimate would “significantly” drive up costs while decreasing state revenue.
