The Biden administration’s newly scheduled oil and gas lease sales don’t set the United States back on its climate change goals, in part because the leases aren’t expected to produce much fuel, climate envoy John Kerry said Wednesday.
Kerry dismissed the notion that the Interior Department’s pending auctions, which will make 144,000 acres of federal land available for fossil fuel development, will tread on President Joe Biden’s ambitions to cut economywide greenhouse gas emissions at least in half before 2030 in an attempt to help the globe mitigate climate change.
“I don’t think it’s a setback because I don’t think a lot of it is going to produce fuel that’s drilled,” Kerry told PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff during a Q&A hosted by the Center for Global Development.
He also made reference to the number of nonproducing leases on federal land that companies currently hold, which numbered somewhere near 14,000 in a recent tally by the Congressional Research Service.
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“Opening something up to a lease, and then they buy the lease, that’s not a well,” he said.
Environmental groups took issue with the administration’s April 15 announcement that it would carry on with onshore lease sales, the first during Biden’s tenure, in response to a federal court decision last summer enjoining a pause Biden put on new leasing.
The administration, however, shrank by 80% the total acreage compared to what had originally been nominated for the sales under the Trump administration.
Biden has been caught in a dilemma during this period of high energy prices between encouraging fossil fuel production, on which the transportation, power, and industrial sectors are still overwhelmingly reliant despite green energy’s inroads, and making progress on its green goals.
The war in Ukraine drove up already-high prices, especially in Europe, leading Biden to pledge to help allies there secure more natural gas supplies from the U.S. and elsewhere to help them displace Russian fuel.
Kerry has previously referred to natural gas as a “bridge fuel” for lower emissions, relative to coal, while emphasizing at the same time that “unabated” fossil fuel use, in which emissions are not captured via carbon management technologies, is not sustainable.
He made the same point to Woodruff: “I’ll take the gas conversion right now, today, for a coal-fired power plant or oil-fired power today in a nanosecond, because the gas is an automatic, immediate 50% reduction in emissions from those other sources.”
But, he said, leaders can’t fall prey “to this snake oil that’s being sold that suggests that we can just go whole-hog with gas that’s unabated for a long term.”
Woodruff also pressed Kerry to defend the administration’s various recent actions on oil and gas, particularly in the face of criticism from environmental groups.
Kerry argued it comes down to lowering prices and maintaining public buy-in.
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“Some people call it short-term political interest. Other people will call it essential stabilization of the economy so that you have the revenues that allow you to be able to do the things you need to do,” Kerry said. “If you don’t have the consent of the governed, at least in a democracy, it is very hard to be able to move forward the way you need to.”
