Representing “negligent disregard for the public safety,” the Obama administration’s proposal for selling fossil fuel companies new leases for drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico comes with a social cost of up to $179.2 billion and risks jeopardizing climate commitments made in the recent UN climate deal.
That’s according to The Climate Change Costs of Offshore Oil Drilling, a new report released by Greenpeace USA and Oil Change International, which looks at the carbon emissions from consumption of the oil expected to be produced from those leases scheduled to take place from 2017 to 2022.
The net increase in global carbon emissions from those leases over their lifespans would be 850 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, the publication states. That’s the equivalent to the annual emissions of 3.6 million passenger vehicles over fifty years, it notes.
And “this increase in emissions,” report author Tim Donaghy, senior research specialist with Greenpeace USA, writes, “comes at a high cost to you and me.” Explaining that social cost, Donaghy writes that, for one,
Yet not only are these social costs not borne by the fossil fuel companies themselves; they are not taken into consideration by the regulatory body, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in its environmental impact analysis for drilling plans.
And that’s a big problem, report states, as
Rather,
“The Obama Administration has advanced a number of commendable policies to mitigate climate change,” Donaghy said in a press statement. “However, leasing federally-owned lands and waters to fossil fuel companies threatens to counteract that progress, including the expected results of the Clean Power Plan and US commitments in the framework of the Paris Climate Agreement.”
“Not accounting for the social cost of carbon in federal leasing decisions is a negligent disregard for the public safety. All Federal energy policy should be held to a climate test, requiring decisions be contingent upon preventing the worst impacts of climate change,” he added.
The organizations’ new report comes less than a week before public comment period for BOEM’s Five-Year Program ends.
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Environmental groups had cheered in March when Obama kept the Atlantic off the proposed drilling plan but said his climate legacy would only be secured by protecting all federal waters from fossil fuel extraction.
“We are telling Big Oil to take their rigs and go home,” Bucket Brigade Executive Director Anne Rolfes said in March during a protest disrupting a federal auction for Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases. “And we are telling our elected officials to get with it, to lead the transition from dirty energy to one that relies on wind and solar.”