January 25, 2021 08:27 AM UTC

Biden's Big Moves On Oil And Gas Signal Bigger Future Shift

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Sun’s Jason Blevins reports, the first few days of Joe Biden’s presidency have included bold steps on the locally contentious issue of oil and gas drilling, the biggest of which (so far) is a 60-day moratorium on new drilling permits for federal lands:

Conservationists are cheering the Biden administration’s 60-day pause on new energy development on public lands as a chance to overhaul an antiquated leasing program that has not been modified in decades. Oil and gas producers are not happy and they are warning of severe economic shocks from the decision announced Thursday.

“Bowing to the environmental left to fulfill a campaign promise and to prove his crew with climate change activists has real consequences for Westerners,” said Kathleen Sgamma with the Western Energy Alliance. “This is a sacrifice of real people’s livelihoods and it does nothing for climate change. If we don’t produce oil and natural gas in the West it gets produced somewhere else and if it comes from overseas, it has even more climate change impact.”

“Bowing to the environmental left to fulfill a campaign promise” has got to be one of the most contorted acknowledgments that Biden is doing exactly what he said he would do as a candidate for President we’ve ever seen. In Colorado, Republicans flooded the airwaves with dire warnings that Biden would take exactly this action. Biden nevertheless won the state of Colorado by over 13 points. This would seem to be a clear indicator that Colorado voters (wait for it) support what he’s doing.

And while that is absolutely unthinkable to the oil and gas industry’s dogmatic defenders in Colorado, for whom their business has morphed into a cult-like devotion to their increasingly obsolescent product, to a majority of Coloradans worried about the effects of climate change these are simply not radical steps anymore. For one thing, it’s not permanent:

Many conservationists hope that the temporary suspension of drilling and leasing Bureau of Land Management acres for oil and gas development kickstarts an overdue overhaul of natural resource management programs.

And just as important in the long run:

And perhaps that reform includes an expansion of funding tools for conservation and public lands that rely less heavily on the country’s oil and gas production, said one Western economist.

This brings up one of the more difficult conundrums facing the conservation movement today: recent legislation like the Great American Outdoors Act, which was championed by now ex-Sen. Cory Gardner to appeal to environmentally conscious Colorado voters, is reliant on funds collected from energy extraction. This puts policymakers in the contradictory position of needing fossil fuel extraction to continue in order to fund conservation projects.

But by far the biggest flaw in Kathleen Sgamma’s argument is the idea that “if we don’t produce oil and natural gas in the West it gets produced somewhere else.” This statement deliberately ignores the goal of accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels shared by the every nation participating in the Paris Agreement the United States rejoined last week. What’s happening here is just the beginning of a much bigger change that the whole world is making. In Colorado and now nationwide, the political mandate for this change has been repeatedly endorsed by the voters. Yes there are economic consequences for fossil fuel producing regions, but every technological revolution in human history has had its winners and losers.

It’s well past time for the clean energy transition we’ve been debating for decades.

The time has come to do real things to get us there.