The report by Public Citizen, a liberal advocacy group, illustrates that President Biden has been slow to reverse Trump’s fossil-fuel-friendly agenda, despite his campaign promise to push for “no more drilling on federal lands” because of climate change.
The analysis looked at data from the Bureau of Land Management, which processes applications for drilling permits on public lands. Its main findings were:
During Biden’s first year in office so far, BLM has approved an average of 333 drilling permits per month. That figure is more than 35% higher than Trump’s first year in office, when BLM approved an average of 245 drilling permits per month.
- That number is also higher than the monthly average in 2018 (279 permits) and 2019 (284 permits), but lower than the monthly average in 2020 (452 permits), when oil companies stockpiled permits in the final months of the Trump administration.
- Under Biden, monthly permit approvals peaked at 652 in April but have started to trend downward in the second half of 2021.
- (When analyzing Biden’s first year in office, the group excluded January 2021, when Trump was in office for most of the month. Similarly, when analyzing Trump’s first year in office, it excluded January 2017, when Barack Obama was president for most of the month.)
“From an environmentalist’s point of view, this doesn’t look great for Biden,” Alan Zibel, the lead author of the analysis and the research director of Public Citizen’s Corporate Presidency Project, told The Climate 202.
Jamie Henn, an organizer with the Build Back Fossil Free coalition who was not involved in the analysis, said the findings underscore his frustrations with the Biden administration.
“The president has basically only tried to tackle one side of the climate problem,” Henn told The Climate 202. “He’s talked a lot about building clean energy, but he hasn’t done anything to stop fossil fuels. And you need to tackle both sides if we’re going to address this crisis.”
Still, Zibel said the findings are “understandable” within a broader legal context, noting that the courts have constrained Biden’s ability to curtail oil and gas development on public lands.