Posted on 02/25/2022 9:28:43 AM PST by Red Badger
KEY POINTS:
The Biden administration is delaying decisions on new oil and gas leases and permits after a Louisiana federal judge blocked officials from using higher cost estimates of climate change.
The leasing pause is an unintended result of the Feb. 11 decision by U.S. District Judge James Cain, who argued that the administration’s attempt to raise the real cost of climate change would hike energy costs.
The ruling has prompted delays and uncertainty across at least four federal agencies that were using higher cost estimates of greenhouse gas emissions in decisions.
*********************************************************************************
The Biden administration is delaying decisions on new oil and gas leases and permits after a Louisiana federal judge blocked officials from using higher cost estimates of climate change when making rules for polluting industries.
The leasing pause is an unintended result of the Feb. 11 decision by U.S. District Judge James Cain, who sided with a group GOP-led states and argued that the Biden administration’s attempt to raise the real cost of climate change would hike energy costs and hurt state revenues from energy production.
The ruling has prompted delays and uncertainty across at least four federal agencies that were using higher cost estimates of greenhouse gas emissions in decisions, including plans to restrict methane emissions from natural gas drilling and a grant program for transit projects. It also continues a contentious legal battle that has hampered Biden’s plans to address climate change.
One of the most significant and unintended outcomes of the ruling is the government’s pause on new oil and gas leases and permits to drill on federal lands and waters. Lease sales in states across the U.S. West, including Montana and Wyoming, are now delayed.
“Agencies are experiencing significant delays and wastes of resources as they scramble to rehash economic and environmental analyses prepared in connection with a broad array of government actions,” the Department of Justice wrote in a legal filing on Saturday.
“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 department wrote.
A pause on new leases and permits On his first day in office, Biden restored the climate cost estimate to roughly $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, following the Trump administration decision to cut the number to roughly $7 or less per ton and account only for the impacts in the U.S. rather than across the world.
The “social cost of carbon” estimate accounts for effects of events like droughts, wildfires, and storms that have grown more frequent and intense with climate change.
In his order, Cain wrote that using such a metric in oil and gas lease reviews would “artificially increase the cost estimates of lease sales,” which would directly impact states receiving bids and production royalties through energy production.
The judge also wrote that the president didn’t have the authority to make a change to the figure through executive order and violated federal law by implementing new rules without getting public comment.
“The President lacks power to promulgate fundamentally transformative legislative rules in areas of vast political, social, and economic importance,” Cain wrote in the injunction.
Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, called Cain’s ruling “legally incoherent,” arguing that it’s put federal agencies in a Catch-22 as they attempt to assess the cost of climate change in major decisions.
“There’s a fair amount of legal precedent for these agencies to consider climate science,” Sarinsky said. “And this injunction prevents them from using these climate estimates.”
Michael Freeman, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, said Cain’s ruling was “deeply flawed and contained numerous legal and factual errors,” and that the government’s decision to delay new leases was unintended fallout.
“Louisiana, and the oil and gas industry, have tripped over their own feet in trying to force the federal government to rush full speed ahead with irresponsible oil and gas development,” Freeman said.
“Ultimately, what Louisiana and the industry really want is for the federal government to just ignore climate change,” Freeman said. “But the law doesn’t let the government do that.”
Dominic Mancini, deputy administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the Office of Management and Budget, said that several agencies are experiencing delays in plans due to the ruling.
Transportation Department officials, for instance, are worried about a delay to a federal grant program for rail and transit projects that could last for months.
The order will also delay the Energy Department’s court-ordered plan to issue energy conservation standards for manufactured housing, Mancini said, as well as a Bureau of Land Management plan to reduce natural gas waste on federal lands.
Environmentalists and legal experts have sharply condemned Cain’s ruling on the real cost of climate change and pointed to the irony of the delayed fossil fuel extraction as a result of the order.
Brett Hartl, the government affairs director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the leasing delay will likely last no more than two month,s and that new drilling permits were unnecessary, excessive and incompatible with the country’s goals to mitigate climate change.
“The sliver of unintended consequence that’s somewhat ironic doesn’t outweigh the reality that this judge’s decision is undermining dozens of important regulations across the government and efforts to address the climate crisis,” Hartl said.
Drilling on public lands generates billions of dollars in revenue and contributes to about a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Despite a campaign vow to stop drilling, Biden has approved more drilling permits on public lands per month than the Trump administration did during Donald Trump’s first three years in office.
Early in his presidency, Biden signed an executive order directing the Interior secretary to halt new leases and begin a thorough review of existing permits for fossil fuel development. But 13 GOP state attorneys general sued and a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the order.
The Democrat Party versus America.
Again.
No worries. We can always import more Saudi and Russian oil. Sure, that will make us vassals of those two countries. But at least our domestic latte-drinking soy-boy tree huggers will be happy.
And that’s all that really matters.
/s
(We need Trump now more than ever. But I state the obvious.)
We can just buy energy from Russia, right? I mean, they need the money — I hear they have a war going on.
Biden continues his war on the working class, and his support of the investor class.
Biden is the biggest ass ever to assume the White House. What is going on in the Ukraine is much more important than climate change. What a doofus!
Energy imports from russia are excluded from the sanctions. We import 7000,000 barrels of oil per day from Russia.
Americans are suffering with inflation and high energy prices.
High energy prices are a big factor in inflation increasing.
Biden could cut off oil imports from Russia and increase domestic energy production which would cut inflation and gas prices per gallon and hurt the Russians.
US and European importation of Russian energy is fueling the Russian War Machine.
Biden is doing this on purpose.
700,000 barrels
We can just buy energy from Russia, right? I mean, they need the money — I hear they have a war going on.
We are buying from them today and have been. We buy from anywhere and everywhere like most countries. Oil is fungible, countries contract to buy where it’s cheapest day to day. It doesn’t matter who you buy from, the futures contracts determine that.
Even when we were calling ourselves “energy independent” we were buying from foreign sources every day. Our max production was 24mm barrels of oil a day. Our use at the time was about 29mm barrels a day.
We are producing about 19mm barrels a day and estimates are that will increase to 20mm by next year despite anything Biden does due to reopening old fields, which Biden can’t stop, they were approved long ago and are still producing.
Some wells were shut in because they weren’t worth producing product at lower prices. Now they are worth producing.
-- Barack Hussein Obama
Two hours after taking office, Dufus killed the Keystone Pipeline and restricted all Federal oil leases, including offshore drilling. Even if you’re an ardent tree-hugger, it makes no sense. Consider the following:
Paints a pretty clear picture of one of THE biggest mistakes and its costing US & Canadian Taxpayers a lot of money. Simple Math as it applies to the Keystone Pipeline
KEYSTONE PIPELINE VS TRAIN VS SHIPS , TO MOVE OIL
Someone with a smart brain spent time putting some numbers together:
1 Train has 100 cars, 2 engines and weighs 27,240,000 LBS.
1 Train carries 3,000,000 gallons of oil.
1 train uses 55.5 gallons of diesel per mile.
It takes 119,000 gallons of diesel to go 2150 miles from Hardidsy, AB to Freeport, TX.
Keystone pipeline was to deliver 34,860,000 gallons of oil per day. It would take 12 trains and 1,428,000 gallons of diesel to deliver that amount. PER DAY!
521,220,000 gallons of diesel per year.
The oil will still go to market with or without the pipeline. By stopping the pipeline billions of gallons of diesel will be wasted and pollute needlessly. Does that make you feel good?
Stop the Tar Sands all together? Then we must ship the oil from the overseas sandbox.
1 large oil tanker can haul 120,000,000 gallons of oil
1 boat takes 15 days to float across the Atlantic.
1 boat uses 63,000 gallons of fuel PER DAY, that is about 1 million gallons of the most polluting type fuel in the world PER TRIP.*(See below)
Or take 3.5 days of Keystone Pipeline to move the same amount of oil with a fraction of the pollution.
*In international waters ship emissions remains one of the least regulated parts of our global transportation system. The fuel used in ships is waste oil, basically what is left over after the crude oil refining process. It is the same as asphalt and is so thick that when cold it can be walked upon . It’s the cheapest and most polluting fuel available and the world’s 90,000 ships chew through an astonishing 7.29 million barrels of it each day, or more than 84% of all exported oil production from Saudi Arabia.
Shipping is by far the biggest transport polluter in the world. There are 760 million cars in the world today emitting approx. 78,599 tons of Sulphur Oxides (SOx) annually. The world’s 90,000 vessels burn approx. 370 million tons of fuel per year emitting 20 million tons of Sulphur Oxides. That equates to 260 times more Sulphur Oxides being emitted by ships than the worlds entire car fleet. One large ship alone can generate approx. 5,200 tons of Sulphur oxide pollution in a year, meaning that 15 of the largest ships now emit as much SOx as the world’s 760 million cars.
Eliminate all gas consuming cars and diesel vehicles?
Worldwide car gas consumption is 403,583,712,000 gallons a year. That’s billion.
Worldwide oil consumption is 1,500,000,000,000 gallons a year. That’s trillion.
It takes 2.15 gallons of oil to make 1 gallon of car gas and .6 gal of diesel.
So it takes 867,704,980,800 gallons of oil to run the worlds cars, most diesel vehicles for a year and some ships.
That leaves 632,295,019,200 gallons of oil for other uses.
Passenger vehicles are only a very small percentage of the problem. If emissions are the problem why not just capture them at the exhaust? Create an industry to clean exhaust instead of crushing and entire industry and building a complete untested, replacement industry?
So are we willing to dramatically increase mining to get all the minerals necessary to make all these batteries and electric motors. Mining is way worse for the environment than oil extraction. Killing Keystone was glibly decided by emotional idiots without smart brains!
Choking off a nations energy supply is the height of treason. Energy is what makes modern economies work and our feudal overlords want to bust us down to dirt-scrabbling peasants and cheap young whores for the powerful.
Energy imports from Russia are excluded from the sanctions.
We import 700,000 barrels of oil per day from Russia.
We are helping fund the Russian War Machine.
“What is going on in the Ukraine is much more important than climate change.”
Everything is more important than global warming which is of zero importance.
We aren’t going to make it for 3 more years.
“Biden is the biggest ass ever to assume the White House.”
Why are you so generous in your description of Biden?
Obama is running things.
“Choking off a nations energy supply is the height of treason.”
That’s what got us Pearl Harbor by the embargo on Japanese oil.
AND PERMITS
That means if you have a lease, you cannot drill.
That was America choking off another country’s energy supply. That was an act of war and not treason. When Japan was faced with its energy supply being cut off it should have avoided war until it had secured alternative energy supplies and solutions. They foolishly chose war first as the remedy and ended up losing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.