#driling

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The administration claims to be in the midst of a formal review of its policies on land resource extraction. Yet since taking office, Biden’s interior department has approved more than 2,000 new permits for drilling and fracking on federal land.

In May, it appealed a federal court order that had paused fracking in Wayne national forest.

In June, it advanced a proposal for new oil and gas exploration at Dinosaur national monument – a proposal the Trump administration had actually suspended under immense pressure from activists.

There are other similar disappointments – from the shocking approval of Trump’s plan to open Alaska’s North Slope to new oil drilling to the approval of the infamous Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline.

At precisely the moment when we must be forcefully rejecting new drilling, fracking and pipeline infrastructure, Biden isn’t just tolerating fossil fuels – he’s uplifting them.

Other worrying signs forecast that more disappointment is yet to come. While they have not fleshed out a definitive policy, administration officials continue to tout the expansion of liquified natural gas (LNG) production, a relic of antiquated Obama-era climate policy, when officials peddled the absurd notion that fracked gas was a clean “bridge” fuel.

Similarly, the administration consistently boosts “carbon capture” as a climate solution, despite abundant evidence that it is absurdly inefficient, cost-ineffective and ultimately unproven. Existing carbon capture projects have cost billions of dollars without removing a significant amount of emitted carbon anywhere.

Furthermore, carbon capture serves as a boon to the oil and gas industry; the US energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, recently went so far as to boast that it would facilitate an increase in fossil fuel production. So billions of dollars in new subsidies will go towards propping up a failed experiment in faulty, corporate-friendly policy.