White House restarting federal oil, gas lease sales next week

US District Judge Terry Doughty ruled that only Congress has the power to pause offshore oil and gas leases and ordered that plans be resumed for delayed lease sales for the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.

Friday s announcement marked the first confirmation by the administration that lease sales on federal land would resume since that ruling. 

Biden and his allies have repeatedly accused energy companies of restricting supply by allowing thousands of drilling permits to go unused. According to BLM, 9,173 unused applications for permits to drill (APD) had been approved as of December 2021, while another 4,621 APDs were pending approval.

However, Republicans and industry representatives said the White House argument about unused leases was meant to distract from the administration s anti-energy policies.

First of all, not every lease is approved, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told Fox News last month. Companies apply for all kinds of leases, and they make the determination, Well, that area s more productive, it makes sense [to drill there] & others may not make as much sense. 

You ve also got a bunch of these places tied up in litigation, and then you ve got an unfriendly administration & that has made very, very clear that it wants America to produce less natural gas and less oil and become greener. That has been a fundamental fact, Rubio added. So who is going to risk capital under an administration whose entire administrative power is focused on making it harder than ever to explore and produce fossil fuels like oil or natural gas? They re not going to do it.

via nypost.com

With our form of government, we do everything necessary in slow motion. No Hamiltonian expeditiousness here! Perhaps it worked in horse and buggy days. But not now. Of course, this assumes what our government would do would be good policy, which is false of course. So most of the time it is a good thing that our government is so hamstrung. Perhaps we are approaching asymptotically that perfect point where the State wishes to do exactly the wrong thing and it will take them forever to do it.