Climate activists want Biden administration to include no new offshore oil and gas leases

BP drilling explosion in Gulf of Mexico — Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, photo by US Coast Guard.

The U.S. Department of the Interior will be creating a Five Year Plan. Climate activists and environmentalists want the Biden administration to make sure there are no new offshore oil and gas leases included in the plan.

This month the Protect All Our Coasts coalition held a press conference to urge President Joe Biden to uphold his climate commitments and include no new oil and gas leases in the Department of the Interior’s draft Five Year Plan.

We listened to part of that press conference on WMNF’s Tuesday Café.

We spoke about drilling with Elise Bennett, the Florida Director and Senior Attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Listen to the full show here:

Watch the interview with Elise Bennett with the Center for Biological Diversity here:

“This is essentially a plan for the next 5 years of oil and gas leasing and it is proposed to have 10 oil and gas leases in the Gulf from 2023 through 2028.

“And we find that extremely concerning because we know that we’re in a climate emergency right now and that every new lease is contributing to more greenhouse gases that are only making this crisis worse.

“So we are urging interior that it needs to issue a new plan that has no new leases.

“The climate emergency, the extinction crisis and our coastal communities here demand nothing less.

“And you know beyond just not issuing new leases under this 5-year plan we also need to see a phase out of oil and gas leasing if we’re really going to meet our goals to protect our planet from global climate change.”
– Elise Bennett on WMNF

We also heard about a new study out of Miami looking at the impact of oil spills on the popular sport fish called mahi mahi – also known as dolphin.

Andrew Warren’s lawsuit against Ron DeSantis

We also heard part of a press conference that Andrew Warren gave in Tallahassee Tuesday morning before his First Amendment trial against Governor Ron DeSantis.