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While Trump Distracts Us, His Admin Brags About Opening Millions of New Acres to Drilling
Since minute one, Trump's Republican administration has been focused on expanding oil, gas and coal development and sweeping away Obama-era environmental initiatives that the administration contends hurt America’s energy industry. It continues and receives zero coverage.
The Trump administration is aggressively pressing ahead in expanding federal oil and gas industry leases that could lead to more drilling on land and at sea, defying an assessment by government scientists that the production and use of fossil fuels is accelerating climate change.
In pursuit of that agenda over the past two years, the administration has sought to reverse dozens of regulations aimed at making oil platforms safer, reducing carbon dioxide and methane released into the atmosphere, and protecting the habitats of endangered animals and those on the verge of an endangered status.
On Friday (3/15/19), the administration announced a final decision to lift protections....on nearly 9 million acres to provide more leasing opportunities to oil, gas and mining industries.
Meanwhile, offshore:
A day earlier (3/14/19), an Interior Department assistant secretary confirmed that he told leaders of the fossil fuel industry last month that the Atlantic coast will almost certainly be included in the administration’s plan to expand federal leasing to nearly the entire outer continental shelf.
....said he found it “absolutely thrilling” that Trump’s “knack for keeping the attention of the media and the public focused somewhere else” has allowed Bureau of Ocean Energy Management employees to process the permits without much scrutiny.
Offshore leases haven’t been granted in the Atlantic for decades, and drilling hasn’t been allowed for a half-century.
In December 2017, Trump announced his administration, at the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, will dramatically shrink the size of the state's two national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. This marked the largest reversal of national monument protections in U.S. history. Since then....
Interior has offered nearly 16.8 million acres of federal land for oil and gas leasing since Trump took office, according to the Center for Biological Diversity — a swath of land larger than the combined size of Maryland and New Jersey. Of those acres, more than 2.3 million were leased, and the department plans to auction off another 1.3 million acres in the spring.