- You imagine if you owned a piece of property
and you cared about climate change,
and somebody came onto your property,
and drilled an oil well,
and started producing oil,
and cause it to make climate change worse.
That's exactly what's happening
with these lands and waters that belong to all of us.
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Are we gonna continue
with the way things have always been done
or are we gonna shift
to the new energy approach
that's necessary in order to keep our planet
from cooking out of control?
And that's the choice that we face right now.
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They are planning in roughly the end of October
to offer 80 million acres
of the Gulf of Mexico,
essentially every unleased available area
in the Gulf of Mexico.
They're planning to offer that for sale
to any oil company that wants to buy the lease.
And that's a huge carbon bomb
that would end up producing
more than a billion barrels of oil
from those leases if they're sold,
and produce that over multiple decades.
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They are relying on the exact same environmental analysis
that the Trump administration relied on
in order to proceed with this sale.
And among other things,
that environmental analysis claims
that it would be better for the world's climate
to proceed with the sale
than to keep all that oil and gas in the ground.
It is not only facially obvious
but it's worse for the climate
to produce a billion more barrels of oil.
In the last year or so,
two federal courts have rejected that same analysis
in two other cases
because it doesn't make any sense and it's unreasoned.
And that's the ground
on which the Biden administration is proceeding here.
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Oil and gas development
is a hugely disruptive industrial operation.
And it happens in the middle of a marine wilderness,
a wild place filled with wild animals
that depend on a clean and healthy environment.
And as we've seen in the BP Horizon oil spill,
for example, the risk of catastrophic harm
for the local environment
from this sort of oil and gas development
is really serious.
And that's just on top of the normal
and still damaging air pollution and water pollution
that comes from an industrially intensive
and dirty activity.
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But at the end of the day,
climate change is an issue
of atmospheric physics.
And climate change is gonna do
what climate change is gonna do,
regardless of the politic.
And we're gonna have to deal with the consequences
of climate change,
regardless of how hard this is politically.
And that's why we need to do it now.
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The reality is that the Biden administration
has a real possibility
to go to the rest of the world
with a robust plan for dealing with climate change.
Forest protection, investments in clean energy
but being willing to tamp down
and to move away from really aggressive oil
and gas production is an important part
of the picture that they need to do.
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