WildEarth Guardians

Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Facing Climate Protests, Feds Abruptly Relocate New Mexico Fossil Fuel Auction

July 20 oil and gas lease sale moved from Santa Fe to Roswell, N.M.
Contact: Rebecca Sobel, (267) 402-0724, rsobel@wildearthguardians.org

Additional Contacts:

Eleanor Bravo, Food & Water Watch, (505) 633-7366, Ebravo@fwwatch.org
Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity, (801) 300-2414, tmckinnon@biologicaldiversity.org

SANTA FE, N.M.— Facing growing climate protests, the Bureau of Land Management has abruptly relocated its July 20 oil and gas lease sale from Santa Fe to Roswell, N.M. For two weeks the only public notice of the change appeared as an obscure link on the BLM website; simultaneously, the agency mailed letters to notify former oil and gas bidders of the location change.

“The BLM’s sudden and unannounced change of venue for the lease auction is a thinly veiled attempt to keep the public out of the process which promises to squander public lands for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry. Increased drilling and fracking on top of the 10,000,000 acres of public land already leased will add to global warming and cause irrevocable damage to what should be a responsible legacy for generations to come,” said Eleanor Bravo, Southwest organizer for Food & Water Watch.

The agency will offer more than 13,000 acres of publicly owned oil and gas in the July auction. More than 200 climate demonstrators protested the agency’s April fossil fuel auction in Santa Fe, calling for an end to the federal fossil fuel leasing program and an immediate moratorium on fracking in Greater Chaco.

"The Obama Administration is doing everything they can to divert attention from public lands oil and gas lease sales," said Rebecca Sobel, Senior Campaigner with WildEarth Guardians. "With 10 million acres of public land leased for oil and gas since he took office, a president trying to look like a climate champion is right to be embarrassed."

The move comes as the Obama administration and the fossil fuel industry advocate moving fossil fuel auctions online to avoid climate protests at auction locations. The first online auction for onshore oil and gas is slated for September. Thousands of people across the country, part of the growing “Keep it in the Ground” movement, have protested auctions in recent months, causing some to be cancelled or postponed.

“Relocating fossil fuel auctions to remote places or websites still doesn’t hide the dangerous disconnect between the administration’s climate rhetoric and its fossil fuel leasing,” said Taylor McKinnon with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The clock is ticking on the climate crisis, and each new lease makes a bad problem worse. It’s time for the president to shut the federal carbon pollution spigot for good.”

Background
The American public owns nearly 650 million acres of federal public land and more than 1.7 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf—and the fossil fuels beneath them. This includes federal public land, which makes up about a third of the U.S. land area, and oceans like Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard. These places and the fossil fuels beneath them are held in trust for the public by the federal government; federal fossil fuel leasing is administered by the Department of the Interior.

Over the past decade, the combustion of federal fossil fuels has resulted in nearly a quarter of all U.S. energy-related emissions. An 2015 report by EcoShift Consulting, commissioned by the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth, found that remaining federal oil, gas, coal, oil shale and tar sands that have not been leased to industry contain up to 450 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. As of earlier this year, 67 million acres of federal fossil fuel were already leased to industry, an area more than 55 times larger than Grand Canyon National Park containing up to 43 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution.

Last year Sens. Merkley (D-Ore.), Sanders (I-Vt.) and others introduced the Keep It In the Ground Act (S. 2238) legislation to end new federal fossil fuel leases and cancel non-producing federal fossil fuel leases. Days later President Obama canceled the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, saying, “Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.”

Download the September “Keep It in the Ground” letter to President Obama. 

Download Grounded: The President’s Power to Fight Climate Change, Protect Public Lands by Keeping Publicly Owned Fossil Fuels in the Ground (this report details the legal authorities with which a president can halt new federal fossil fuel leases). 

Download The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions of U.S. Federal Fossil Fuels (this report quantifies the volume and potential greenhouse gas emissions of remaining federal fossil fuels) and The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions fact sheet. 

Download Over-leased: How Production Horizons of Already Leased Federal Fossil Fuels Outlast Global Carbon Budgets.

Download Public Lands, Private Profits, a report about the corporations that are profiting from climate-destroying fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

Download the Center for Biological Diversity’s formal petition calling on the Obama administration to halt all new offshore fossil fuel leasing.

Download WildEarth Guardians’ formal petition calling on the Department of the Interior to analyze the climate impacts of the federal oil and gas leasing program and to place a moratorium on new leasing until that study is completed.