Rumor has it that after today’s signing of a moratorium on oil and gas leasing on public lands, President Biden’s going to personally deliver one million pink slips to beleaguered workers, light billions of dollars on fire, and then rub dirt in their eye while he’s at it.
Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s basically the gist of what the oil industry and it’s stalwart WSJ editorial board and front-group defenders are saying about Biden’s move to stop selling companies the fossil fuels buried under the land we share as a nation.
Histrionic caterwauling of professional crybabies aside, what’s the reality of President Biden’s expected move to stop selling out America’s lands to the industry that’s destroying it?
First off, oil companies aren’t exactly hurting for new leases, so the immediate impact is going to be pretty small. After all, the Trump administration made a point to give out thousands of permits last year (4,700, to be exact, about the same quantity they snatched up when gas was twice as expensive) so by the final weeks of his first and final term, oil majors weren’t even interested in leases being offered.
So… what President Biden does in terms of supply might not matter much, because there’s clearly not much of a demand to drill right now anyway. That said, in the long term it will certainly make a difference, because the US fracked gas is particularly methane-heavy (and thus especially bad for the climate), and together with the oil drilled on public lands, represents some 10% of our supply. Hardly a death blow, but certainly not nothing!
As for the “what of the blue collar worker?” tears, they’d seem a lot less crocodilian if the industry hadn’t just taken $15 billion in pandemic aid last year, and then turned around and fired thousands of workers anyway, just like it was doing well before the COVID-19 crisis.
Perhaps the government would feel more inclined to keep selling oil and gas companies our country’s bounty if the industry were actually bothering to pay anything near what it’s worth. Trump’s bargain basement discounts, however, have already sapped the argument that this is an industry that can be relied upon to fill government coffers.
Oh but what will generate some reliable-long term profits, while also generating some energy? Solar leasing is more than ready to fill that void. While oil and gas leases are at century-old rates, starting at just $1.50/year for the first five years, solar lease have ranged from $17.48 to $58,470.84, and elsewhere, new wind development is already filling holes left by oil revenue lost during the pandemic.
And, seriously for a second, we can't forget about the workers themselves, though they certainly don’t number in the millions like API’s fearmongering suggests. While their CEOs might not care about them, they have an important role to play in the new clean energy economy -- capping the millions of uncapped, abandoned, and orphaned wells littered all across the country to start with. These old wells are legally the responsibility of companies but in practice are rarely cleaned up by those who extracted the profit. Capping the 2.6 million unplugged wells that we know of (there are probably another million we’re not sure about) would be a great job for former oil and gas workers.
Makes sense, right? Instead of paying them to continue making a mess, we employ them to start cleaning it up. It's a win-win for everyone but oil CEOs, which makes it a win-win-win.
So much winning.
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