Hot Air

Again, these climate conferences are meaningless because nations are just not going to stop processing fossil fuels until they are all gone. Or at least the US won’t.

The Biden administration today will offer leases to oil and gas companies on more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico — an area larger than New Mexico — days after a United Nations climate summit that aimed to phase out fossil fuel production worldwide.

Critics noted that the sale comes just four days after the United States sought to reclaim a leadership role at COP26, the climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

“This administration went to Scotland and told the world that America’s climate leadership is back, and now it’s about to hand over 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to fossil fuel companies,” House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said in a statement.

“As predicted, this is a carbon bomb in the Gulf — leasing off another 1.7 million offshore acres dwarfs the size of any newly-protected acres that the Biden administration is looking toward in places like Chaco Canyon,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the advocacy group Center for Western Priorities, told The Climate 202.

An analysis by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found that the lease sale has the potential to emit 723 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over its lifetime — equivalent to operating more than 70 percent of the country’s coal plants for a year. 

Sometimes, you understand where the belief that both parties are the same comes from.