The Bureau of Land Management’s Utah office was to hold its first oil and gas lease auction Thursday since Biden’s arrival in the White House, offering but a single Uinta Basin parcel that came with an old natural gas well that the new lessee would be required to plug and reclaim.
McLish #3 in the Horseshoe Bend gasfield is among hundreds of unproductive wells dotting Utah’s public lands. Many of these pose a threat to the environment after their operators bailed on their reclamation obligations.
However, it turned out the BLM itself plugged this well several months ago, so the agency nixed the sale, much to the delight of environmental groups.
The far-left group The Sierra club was behind the lawsuit and now the same group is trying to terminate other leases in Wyoming.
The Interior Department still planned auctions in seven other Western states this week, prompting a lawsuit from several other groups alleging the Biden administration must take more aggressive steps to limit fossil fuel production on public lands.
The burning of coal, oil and gas is the leading driver of greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.
Led by the Center for Biological Diversity and Sierra Club, the environmental suit was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Wyoming, where most of the 144,000 acres of proposed leases are located.
Biden isn’t lowering gas prices and he doesn’t care about suffering Americans.
