During the election campaign, President-elect Joe Biden pledged to end new oil and gas leasing and permitting on federal lands (including federal waters); that is, to ban on those lands the discovery and development of fossil energy resources by private companies, and to end approvals of specific drilling proposals that result from leasing rights. Biden further pledged to ban hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) – a specific production technology – on federal lands.
The proposed bans are driven by Biden’s apparent belief in the commonly-asserted “existential crisis” for climate phenomena resulting from increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. That those GHG trends are having effects that we can detect is incontrovertible; anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon. That is very different from arguing that a “crisis” is upon us, an assertion for which there is no evidence.
But Biden and the individuals likely to staff his various climate policy efforts are adamant in terms of the “existential crisis” argument, and Biden’s opposition to the use of federal lands for fossil production was so prominent during the campaign that it is certain that his administration will attempt to implement such a ban. Less noticed during the campaign is the reality that an end to fossil leasing, permitting and fracking on federal land is both incoherent and perverse, for reasons political and analytic.