Alaska oil and gas lease sales canceled

Yesterday the Biden administration continued its energy squeeze plan. They canceled a large sale of oil and gas leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore they did this at the worst possible time: when fuel is running short and sells at record prices. Can they fail to realize how this will anger the American public? Have they forgotten that people vote? Or does it not matter to them, because they plan a repeat of 2000 Mules?

The Alaska and Gulf oil lease sales

We hear this from USA Today, US News and World Report, and The Patriot Journal. Specifically, the Department of the Interior canceled three oil and gas lease sales they had planned to hold. These lease sales included one in Alaska and two in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they canceled the Alaska sale because few in the industry were even interested. And in the Gulf they said they had contradictory court rulings – on the legality of their own policies.

Recall that in January 2021, Biden paused all oil and gas leasing, pleading “climate change.” Thirteen States challenged the legality of that policy. Judge Terry Doughty issued a temporary injunction against the moratorium. Reluctantly the Interior Department went forward with a lease sale. Then a Washington, D.C. district judge blocked that sale. The case is now before the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Judicial Circuit.

In the meantime, motorists are paying record prices at the pump. Diesel fuel might actually run out.

The environmentalists, of course are linking arms and dancing jigs. The Center for Biological Diversity wants no more offshore drilling, no matter what. Another group denies that the lease sales would have lowered prices. That either is a lie or bespeaks total ignorance on how commodities markets work. The very prospect of no more supply in future, will drive up prices today. You don’t have to be a financial analyst to know this.

What’s really going on

If the industry has in fact shown little interest in offshore leases, that’s because they don’t know whether the Interior Department will cancel the leases after they start exploring. They don’t want to waste time, money and effort to find something, only for the government to say, “Stop.”

Alaska has always been a bone of contention. People who don’t even live there think human civilization spoils that “pristine environment” anyway. Leave it to the caribou and the walruses – and the Inuit and the Aleuts. Maybe what they really want is to withdraw from Alaska and cede it to that new polity the Canadians started to build: Inuit Nunangat, the Abode of the Inuit. Or, less politically correctly perhaps, Eskimoland.

But even that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that some people don’t like American civilization. So they latch onto any excuse. If “biodiversity” won’t serve, “climate change” will.

In fact, this should remind us of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, that failed of ratification in 1993. In case everyone has forgotten, Dr. Michael S. Coffman drew a map of the Lower Forty-eight showing what things would look like with full implementation of that treaty and two other “re-wilding” projects.

This, then, has been the dream of Gaylord Nelson and the other founders of Earth Day.

Elections have consequences. So the only way to turn this around, is with your votes at Midterms. But be careful – Biden and his crew might cheat again. Don’t let them.

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