Is Obama Listening?
As World Leaders Gather in Paris, Climate Fight Heats Up at Home in D.C.
As world leaders negotiate a climate change agreement this week in Paris, the Obama administration shrewdly avoided a show of hypocrisy here at home.
Faced with the threat of public protests, officials on Monday halted a Bureau of Land Management federal oil and gas auction scheduled for today (Dec. 10) in Washington, D.C. The sales have been rescheduled for March. This move averts the public embarrassment of a D.C. protest during the Paris climate talks and follows the postponement of another public lands fossil fuel auction in Utah last month.
We hope these decisions represent a serious effort by Obama and the BLM to recognize the folly of leasing public lands for fossil fuel extraction, and not merely an attempt to delay the sales until the pressure dies down. It won’t.
I had planned to be one of the protesters at today’s auction in D.C. as part of the growing “Keep It in the Ground” movement. People rallied in Denver and Salt Lake City last month and in Reno this week at another BLM federal fossil fuel auction. We’ll keep showing up wherever these sales are held until the U.S. bans the destruction of public lands in pursuit of dangerous carbon energy.
By leasing federal fossil fuels that should be considered “unburnable” in the context of global carbon budgets, these auctions highlight the dangerous disconnect between the Obama administration’s climate goals and its “all-of-the-above” energy policy. Federal fossil fuels — those that the president controls — should be the first taken off the table to fight climate change.
Scientists are clear: to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, more than 80 percent of known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground. Banning new fossil fuel leases on public lands and oceans would keep up to 450 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution out of the atmosphere, the equivalent of annual emissions from 118,000 coal-fired power plants. It will also help protect these special places from degradation and preserve the wildlife, clean air and water that belong to all of us.
Keeping this public carbon in the ground and under the oceans will be even more vital if, as is widely expected, the Paris accord lacks measures to avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming. If we are going to limit the effects of climate change, banning the sale of federal oil, gas and coal leases is a good place to start. After all, the president has the authority to do so without congressional approval.
If the administration can’t handle the optics of auctioning fossil fuels while negotiating a climate deal in Paris, it shouldn’t be auctioning off federal fossil fuels at all.
It’s time to end the federal fossil fuel leasing program to align public lands and oceans management with our climate goals. If fossil fuels are extracted, they will be burned. Real climate leadership means keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
Until then, we’ll continue to hold the administration accountable by showing up at every federal lease auction. The stakes are too high to allow business as usual to continue.
Randi Spivak is director of the Public Lands program at the Center for Biological Diversity.
