Late Monday afternoon, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) held a public comment hearing for the government’s proposed five-year offshore oil and gas lease program. The plan calls for 11 additional lease sales: 10 in the Gulf of Mexico and one in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. Though the session was expected to initially last three hours, dozens of participants pushed BOEM officials to extend the comment hearing well past midnight.
The sentiment was nearly unanimous, with countless speakers calling for no new leases, citing climate concerns. Many speakers called on President Joe Biden to uphold his own campaign promise that, had the Interior Department been serious about it, wouldn’t have seen these leases proposed in the first place. Some, like Stone Crab Alliance Founder John Dwyer, even called for the shuttering of existing oil infrastructure. “It is important for our human survival,” Dwyer said.
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Around 230 attendees heard from speakers on behalf of environmental groups as well as members of front-line communities and allies committed to a just transition away from the very fossil fuel leases proposed in the 2023-2028 Proposed Program and Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Peter Robbins-Brown, a New Orleanian and the executive director of Louisiana Progress, slammed “the degradation caused by the oil and gas industry that has made our incredibly unique and beautiful landscape harder and harder if not impossible for folks to live and thrive” and called for the Gulf to become, instead, a leader in a just transition to renewables.
“Louisiana and the Gulf in general have been leaders in this country’s energy infrastructure for a century or more. We can continue to be leaders in energy for centuries plural to come if we focus on [renewables],” Robbins-Brown continued. “We can lead on those and create the kind of world and region where my child and everybody else’s child … can live and thrive and be healthy and happy.”
That’s unwelcome news to the handful of commenters who called for more drilling, one of whom worried he would lose his mineral rights payouts if drilling were to cease. Another was an outright pro-coal climate denier, who was followed by an angry Pennsylvanian bitter about fuel costs but willing to turn communities into sacrifice zones for his own benefit. The speaker did, at least, call for as much drilling as possible in all waters instead of simply focusing on the Gulf and the Gulf only. Hey, landlocked states, don’t forget about Alaska when it comes to enriching yourselves without incurring the same types of risks!
Which, of course, concerned community members in Alaska did not. Instead of talking out of their necks with erroneous information, folks like Cook Inletkeeper Director of Communications Taylor Kendall-Smith, who lives in Homer, Alaska, showed that there is strength in numbers. Kendall-Smith said herself and nearly 93,000 others also voiced their opposition to a recent lease sale in the federal waters of the Lower Cook Inlet. Lease Sale 258 was ultimately canceled, and climate activists like Kendall-Smith are committed to fighting any new leases as well. As Kendall-Smith and many other speakers noted, “every oil spill begins with a lease sale.”
No matter what beliefs you have on a so-called energy mix for the sake of “bringing down gas prices,” whatever the cost to fill up your car will do nothing to prevent the environmental catastrophe that may one day wreck your home. Story after story about the BP oil spill brought back my own memories of the disaster and the struggle to see a future in the Gulf South in the face of such rampant neglect. And I’m sorry, but calling for drilling that has no bearing on present-day fuel prices without reckoning with the blatant inequality perpetuated by such a move is a lose-lose for all Americans.
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