US oil drilling, chunk as big as Italy
In the latest clash to Joe Biden’s stature as the ‘climate president’, 73.3m acres of the Gulf will be auctioned for US fossil fuel extraction.
A vast swathe of the Gulf of Mexico, approximately an area the size of Italy, will be offered off for oil and gas drilling on Wednesday dawn, in the latest letdown to Joe Biden’s increasingly frayed prominence on dealing with the climate problem.
Biden’s unit of the interior is auctioning a vast size of the central and western Gulf, including diving deep water reaches, for drilling projects that will extend out over decades, despite scientists’ urgent alerts that fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out if the planet is to avoid catastrophic global heating.
Despite Biden’s pre-election commitment to stop all drilling on federal lands and waters, the offer also come.
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In all, 73.3m acres (30m hectares), an area around the size of Italy, will be made open to drilling firms less than a month before the 13th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe.
According to the US federal government, the deal, known as lease 259, can extract almost one bn barrels of oil and 4.4tn cubic feet of gas over the following 50 years.
The auctions arrive only two weeks after Biden’s government authorised the controversial Willow project, a drilling endeavour in the small tundra of Alaska’s arctic that will extract more than 600m barrels of oil over its lifetime, and the two activities have caused significant terror among those in favour of a comfortable climate, including Biden’s familiar allies.
