The Obama administration is delaying until March its latest round of oil and natural gas leases, which was scheduled to be held the day before the end of the climate talks in Paris on Friday.
Environmentalists are claiming victory for the schedule change as a result of their campaign to pressure President Obama to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management announced Monday it would reschedule the lease sale and combine it with the next quarterly sale on March 17. It did not discuss the climate change talks as being a factor or that the leasing program would be suspended in any way.
The lease sale would have occurred one day before the United Nations climate talks were to conclude in Paris. Reaching a deal to limit global emissions from fossil fuels is a key objective of Obama’s last year in office. The emissions that the deal would seek to limit are blamed by many scientists for causing the climate of the earth to warm, resulting in more severe weather and floods.
“Under pressure from climate campaigners, the Obama administration announced a last-minute delay for a fossil fuel auction scheduled for this Thursday in Washington, D.C.,” a coalition of environmental groups said ahead of their plans to demonstrate against the lease auctions in Washington Thursday.
“Today’s decision marks a victory for the growing movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and hold President Obama to his promise to leave a safe climate future for present and future generations,” said Marissa Knodel with the group Friends of the Earth, which is a member of the coalition. “President Obama cannot claim climate leadership as long as his administration continues to offer our public lands and waters for fossil fuel exploitation.”
Knodel said the groups “will be back in March and at every other lease sale until he recognizes that his climate legacy depends on keeping fossil fuels in the ground.”
The Interior Department had planned to auction leases for oil and gas drilling in Arkansas and Michigan, totaling just more than 507 acres, according to the agency.
“The Obama administration continues to lease public lands for catastrophic fossil fuel extraction, but the growing movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground has them reconsidering,” said Kelly Mitchell, Greenpeace’s climate change campaign director.
Mitchell says the Department of Interior has been forced into “doing the bidding of massive corporations while ignoring public outcry and climate consequences, so it’s past time for there to be some accountability.”
Mitchell says, if the Department of the Interior “won’t make the right decision on its own, President Obama needs to step in and direct Secretary [of Interior] Sally Jewell to stop these leases now.”
