End new federal fossil fuel leasing to the extent legally possible, by slowing and eventually stopping new leases, and withdrawing sensitive areas from availability. Perform a comprehensive analysis of the environmental, climate, and economic impacts of the federal fossil fuel program to bring balance to the management of public lands and waters. What are we pushing the government to do? In the Gulf of Mexico, we’re suing the federal government for opening 80 million offshore acres to oil and gas leasing. In the western U.S., we successfully challenged the Trump administration’s plan to lease more than a million acres of sage-grouse habitat. In the far north, we’ve fended off attempts to open the Arctic Ocean, the Arctic Refuge, and the Western Arctic to fossil fuel drilling. We’re also pushing for the Earth’s most sensitive places to be declared off-limits to the oil and gas industry altogether: When federal agencies issue a lease without taking into account a project’s environmental and human impacts, we sue to make that analysis happen. What is Earthjustice doing to fight the harms of fossil fuel development?Įarthjustice takes the government to court to account for the damage caused by oil, gas, and coal development. Thousands of smaller oil spills occur every year that don’t make headlines. Oil spills are also difficult to fully contain: less than a quarter of the BP oil was recovered, leaving more than 154 million gallons of oil in the water that continue to pollute coastal and ocean ecosystems. One of the worst examples of this, the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, left eleven rig workers dead and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico: it decimated tourism and the fishing industry, killed millions of individual marine animals including fish, dolphins, whales, shrimp, and seabirds, and sickened thousands of people. Development in the Gulf has resulted in heavily degraded air, land, and water for decades. In the Gulf of Mexico, Black, Indigenous, and low-income communities have suffered a long history of living in an area that serves as a sacrificial zone for the oil industry. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns and releases oil on April 21, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico. No place is undamaged once it’s been carved up by fossil fuel infrastructure, but some ecosystems are extremely vulnerable. What places are especially harmed by oil, gas, and coal development? 
Companies are often allowed to walk away from their pollution, and leave taxpayers on the hook to pay for clean-up. These paltry amounts do not include costs associated with climate damage, pollution, and clean-up after fossil fuel companies finish drilling. The federal royalty rate has not been updated since 1920. The government sells land at an incredibly low rate: as low as $2 an acre. While these leases are a boon to the industry, they are a terrible deal for the American people. Even if the government stopped mortgaging our future and ceased to issue new leases, fossil fuel companies would still have enough public land in their grips to keep producing for at least 10 years. Over half of those acres are non-producing - stockpiled by the industry and held in reserve. The oil and gas industry has over 26 million acres of land under lease, and over 12 million acres of ocean. Oil from the Deepwater Horizon has affected wildlife throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Learn more about what Earthjustice is doing to protect our public lands and waters, and how you can help.Ī brown pelican covered in oil sits on the Louisiana coast in June 2010.
Read on to learn about the broken federal oil, gas, and coal leasing program and why it’s a bad deal. Reforming the federal leasing program is crucial to meaningfully address climate change. These leases lock us into decades of dirty energy and climate-heating pollution: 25% of the nation’s total climate emissions come from extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels on public land. This is a bad deal, for us, the climate, and the environment. Through a process called the federal leasing program, private companies are allowed to carve up public lands and waters to extract fossil fuels.
The federal agencies involved are supposed to balance conservation with other uses, including fossil fuel extraction - a balance that is now way off in favor of fossil fuel companies in a time of climate change. This management includes overseeing public lands ranging from national parks and forests, to continental shelf waters and marine sanctuaries. government is tasked with managing federal lands and waters for the good of the American people.
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