[ad_1]
President Joe Biden has made controlling inflation a political goal. With mid-term elections uncertain in November, and energy prices at record highs in the US in part as a result of the war in Ukraine, the president wants to incentivize domestic oil and gas production to relieve pressure on homes and Business. To do this, Washington will grant new exploitation licenses on public land to private companies, although at higher prices.
The measure, which will take effect next week, will mean the rental of an area of 145,000 acres (about 58,700 hectares) of public federal land spread over nine of the 50 states in the country. Concessionaire companies must pay the federal government a tax equivalent to 18.75% of the profits they extract from exploitation, six points more than until now.
The new leases, the first of the Biden Administration, put an end to the moratorium established in January 2021 -when the Democrat arrived at the White House-, which suspended gas and oil exploitation permits on federal land to combat the crisis. climate. Biden resorted to a battery of executive orders, or presidential decrees, to circumvent the Republican opposition and conspicuous representatives of his own party, such as Senator Joe Manchin, closely linked to the energy industry and a self-confessed critic of Biden’s green initiatives. .
The price of energy, whose year-on-year rate increased by 32% in March, is the main driver of inflation, which reached 8.5% that month, also at an annualized rate, and a pressing challenge for Biden once the The coronavirus pandemic has entered a control or new normal phase, despite the impact of the new BA.2 variant. The president finds himself between a rock and a hard place: between his promises to combat climate change and his toast to the middle class, around which he articulated the content of his campaign. Urged by the circumstances, he has chosen to park one of his 2020 promises, although the new concessions must take into account the environmental impact assessment on the surface.
The measure was announced this Good Friday by the Department of the Interior, on which federal public lands depend, and immediately drew criticism from both sides: from environmental groups and from the industry, which regrets that Biden has not gone further, even though he considers it a step in the right direction, and who also entertains a relationship full of suspicions with the democrat, especially in relation to the fracking, or hydraulic fracturing technique, which the president wanted to regulate. In the crosshairs of environmentalists, the fracking It is criticized for its pronounced environmental impact due to the contamination of land and aquifers due to the use of chemicals.
Environmental sources have called the granting of new licenses a “reckless failure of climate leadership.” The Democratic president returned the US to the global Paris Climate Agreement, from which his predecessor, Republican Donald Trump, had withdrawn. Biden repeatedly promised on the campaign trail that he would stop federal drilling auctions, but his attempt has been blocked by legal challenge from Republican-led states, some of which are heavily dependent on the energy industry.
He knows in depth all the sides of the coin.
subscribe
The one announced today is not the first measure of the Biden Administration to lower the price of energy. On three occasions since last November, its Executive has resorted to strategic oil reserves. Since December, two months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Executive has been urging the industry to increase production and the number of platforms, while reopening some in fields that have been almost abandoned since 2020 due to the low price of oil and low profitability. , in Oklahoma and Colorado. Washington has reiterated that companies face no government restrictions on drilling in the short term, though in the long term it continues to encourage them to adopt cleaner forms of energy in response to climate change.
[ad_2]