July, 12 2016, 11:15am EDT

Historic Petition Calls on Obama Administration to Immediately Halt All New Fossil Fuel Leases on Federal Lands
264 Groups Join Call to Align Federal Energy Policies With U.S. Climate Goals
WASHINGTON
More than 250 climate, community and tribal organizations filed a landmark legal petition today calling on the Obama administration to halt all new fossil fuel leasing on federal lands -- a step that would align U.S. energy policies with its climate goals and keep up to 450 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution from entering the atmosphere.
The petition, filed under the federal Administrative Procedures Act, calls on Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to place an immediate moratorium on new leases for federally managed, publicly owned oil, gas, tar sands and oil shale. The moratorium would remain until and unless it can be demonstrated that resumption of fossil fuel mining on public lands is consistent with meeting the U.S. goal of holding global warming "well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels" and pursuing efforts to "limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels," as agreed to by the United States and 194 other countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
"The clock is ticking on the climate crisis, and one of the most powerful steps the Obama administration can take right now is turn off the carbon pollution spigot on America's public lands," said Michael Saul, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney and primary author of the petition. "A moratorium on federal leasing is critical to ensure the United States does its part to meet the global climate commitments we made last year in Paris."
Led by the Center, the petition follows on the heels of a new analysis that finds that already leased federal fossil fuels will last far beyond the point the world will exceed the carbon pollution limits set out in the Paris Agreement. Crude oil under lease will produce through 2055, 34 years past the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold; gas under federal lease will produce through 2044, 23 years beyond the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold; and coal under federal lease will produce 25 years through 2041, 20 years past the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold.
The Department of the Interior has the statutory authority under the Mineral Leasing Act to determine if and when to lease federal lands for fossil fuel extraction. Given that fuels already under lease exceed any sustainable climate targets, the secretary can and should exercise that authority to halt new leasing, according to today's petition.
The findings support the growing call to President Obama by hundreds of organizations to immediately halt new federal fossil fuel leasing -- a step that will keep up to 450 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution in the ground (EcoShift 2015) and prevent 100 million tons in annual emissions through 2030 (SEI 2016).
Statements From Petition Signatories
"If there's any chance of preventing the worst impacts of climate change, we must keep coal, oil and gas in the ground," said May Boeve, executive director of 350.org. "But we can't do that if the Obama administration continues to sell that ground to the highest bidding fossil fuel companies. Now President Obama has a choice to make: expand oil and gas drilling indefinitely, or join us in doing what's best for communities and the climate."
"These lands are meant to benefit the public as a whole. Instead, they are being used to enrich fossil fuel companies while devastating our shared natural resources and putting communities around the world at risk," said Marc Yaggi, executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance. "We must end federal fossil fuel leasing now to ensure our resiliency against climate change."
"This is a health issue as much as it is an environmental issue," said Barbara Gottlieb, director for environment and health at Physicians for Social Responsibility. "Our use of fossil fuels is driving climate change and accelerating the heat waves, extreme storms, spread of insect-borne diseases, and other health effects associated with an overheated planet. A moratorium on fossil fuel leases on public lands is a smart step to slow the damage and lessen the dangers to health."
"Fossil fuel companies have already made millions off public land leases while wrecking the environment. We know that continuing the leasing program will create catastrophic climate change. It's time for President Obama to follow through on the climate commitment he made in Paris, end the corporate giveaway, and halt all new leases on public lands," said Amanda Starbuck, climate and energy program director at Rainforest Action Network.
"Florida is on the front lines of climate change. As sea levels rise, our coastal freshwater ecosystems are being lost and our underground aquifers are being inundated with salt water. Florida reefs have suffered unprecedented bleaching due to higher temperatures -- even as increased ocean acidity makes ocean chemistry incompatible with corals and other marine life," said Matthew Schwartz, executive director of South Florida Wildlands Association. "We must do all we that we can to reverse this alarming trend. This moratorium is an excellent step in the right direction."
"On the heels of yet another hottest-month-on-record for the U.S., it's clear that climate change is already here. The question is how much worse will it get. We simply can't continue to drill, mine and burn more fossil fuels while global warming passes the point of no return. By ending new leasing on federal lands, President Obama can start us on the path to a just transition away from fossil fuels and toward a 100 percent clean, renewable energy future," said Rachel Richardson, director of the Stop Drilling Program for Environment America.
"The world's mainstream medical organizations are acknowledging that the climate crisis is the greatest public health threat of our time. The health and well-being of billions of people will be put at risk if we do not act quickly and decisively to end our world wide fossil fuel dependency. For the United States to do its share, and maintain its leadership role with other nations, we cannot continue to open up federal lands for dirty energy leasing," said Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.
"We work to create resilient communities here in Texas and climate change is a top concern. We must transition away from fossil fuels that are destroying our communities. Ending new federal fossil fuel leasing would be a big step to averting dangerous climate change," said Kathy Redmond, Organizer Resilient Nacogdoches, Texas.
"Halting fossil fuel leases on federal lands is a necessary step to move the country, and Nevada, toward a clean energy solution to this climate crisis," said Ellen Moore of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. "The Obama administration must listen to the thousands of people who have protested the leasing of public lands for oil and gas. Without the moratorium public lands in our state will continue to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, presenting immediate risks to the health of our communities and wildlife, and putting the future of the planet in peril."
"The science is clear -- if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we must keep dirty fuels in the ground," said the director of Sierra Club's Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign, Lena Moffitt. "The Obama administration was right to have placed a moratorium on coal leasing on our public lands, and it should expand that to cover all fossil fuel operations. Protecting our public lands and ensuring they remain open for future generations enjoyment is a clear and obvious place for this process to continue."
Background
The American public owns nearly 650 million acres of federal public land and more than 1.7 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf -- and the fossil fuels beneath them. This includes federal public land, which makes up about a third of the U.S. land area, and ocean areas such as Alaska's Chukchi Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard. These places and the fossil fuels beneath them are held in trust for the public by the federal government; federal fossil fuel leasing is administered by the Department of the Interior.
Over the past decade, the combustion of federal fossil fuels has resulted in nearly a quarter of all U.S. energy-related emissions. An 2015 report by EcoShift Consulting, commissioned by the Center and Friends of the Earth, found that remaining federal oil, gas, coal, oil shale and tar sands that have not been leased to industry contain up to 450 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. As of earlier this year, 67 million acres of federal fossil fuel were already leased to industry -- an area more than 55 times larger than Grand Canyon National Park containing up to 43 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution.
Download the September "Keep It in the Ground" letter to President Obama.
Download Grounded: The President's Power to Fight Climate Change, Protect Public Lands by Keeping Publicly Owned Fossil Fuels in the Ground (this report details the legal authorities with which a president can halt new federal fossil fuel leases).
Download The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions of U.S. Federal Fossil Fuels (this report quantifies the volume and potential greenhouse gas emissions of remaining federal fossil fuels) and The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions fact sheet.
Download Public Lands, Private Profits (this report details the corporations profiting from climate-destroying fossil fuel extraction on public lands).
Download the Center for Biological Diversity's formal petition calling on the Obama administration to halt all new offshore fossil fuel leasing.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
(520) 623-5252LATEST NEWS
UN Expert Calls for 'Defossilization' of World Economy, Criminal Penalties for Big Oil Climate Disinformation
Fossil fuel companies have for decades "instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables," said U.N. climate expert Elisa Morgera.
Jun 30, 2025
As health officials across Europe issued warnings Monday about extreme heat that could stretch into the middle of the week in several countries—the kind of dangerous conditions that meteorologists have consistently said are likely to grow more frequent due to human-caused climate change—a top United Nations climate expert told the international body in Geneva that the "defossilization" of all the world's economies is needed.
Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on climate change, presented her recent report on "the imperative of defossilizing our economies," with a focus on the wealthy countries that are projected to increase their extraction and use of fossil fuels despite the fact that "there is no scientific doubt that fossil fuels... are the main cause of climate change."
"Despite overwhelming evidence of the interlinked, intergenerational, severe, and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle," said Morgera, "these countries have and are still accruing enormous profits from fossil fuels, and are still not taking decisive action."
World leaders must recognize the phase-out of fossil fuels "as the single most impactful health contribution" they could make, she argued.
Morgera named the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada as wealthy nations where governments are still handing out billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies each year—direct payments, tax breaks, and other financial support whose elimination could reduce worldwide fossil fuel emissions by 10% by 2030, according to the report.
"These countries are responsible for not having prevented the widespread human rights harm arising from climate change and other planetary crises we are facing—biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, and economic inequalities—caused by fossil fuels extraction, use, and waste," said Morgera.
She also pointed to the need to "defossilize knowledge" by holding accountable the companies that have spent decades denying their own scientists' knowledge that continuing to extract oil, coal, and gas would heat the planet and cause catastrophic sea-level rise, hurricanes, flooding, and dangerous extreme heat, among other weather disasters.
Defossilizing information systems, said Morgera, would mean protecting "human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence" and correcting decades of "information distortions" that have arisen from the public's ongoing exposure to climate disinformation at the hands of fossil fuel giants, the corporate media, and climate-denying politicians.
Morgera said states should prohibit all fossil fuel industry lobbying, which companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron spent more than $153 million last year in the U.S. alone—with spending increasing each year since 2020, according to OpenSecrets.
"More recent research has documented climate obstruction—intentional delaying efforts, including through media ownership and influence, waged against efforts for effective climate action aligned with the current scientific consensus," wrote Morgera. "Fossil fuel companies' lobbyists have increased their influence in public policy spaces internationally... and at the national level, to limit regulations and enforcement. They have instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables, and have promoted speculative or ineffective solutions that present additional lock-in risks and higher costs."
While a transition to a renewable energy-based economy has been portrayed by the fossil fuel industry and its supporters in government as "radical," such a transition "is now cheaper and safer for our economics and a healthier option for our societies," Morgera toldThe Guardian on Monday.
"The transition can also lead to significant savings of taxpayer money that is currently going into responding to climate change impacts, saving health costs, and also recouping lost tax revenue from fossil fuel companies," she said. "This could be the single most impactful health contribution we could ever make. The transition seems radical and unrealistic because fossil fuel companies have been so good at making it seem so."
In addition to lobbying bans, said Morgera, governments around the world must ban fossil fuel advertising and criminalize "misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry" as well as media and advertising firms that have amplified the industry's disinformation and misinformation.
Several countries have taken steps toward meeting Morgera's far-reaching demands, with The Hague in the Netherlands introducing a municipal ordinance in 2023 banning fossil fuel ads, the Australian Green Party backing such a ban, and Western Australia implementing one.
The fossil fuel industry's "playbook of climate obstruction"—from lobbying at national policymaking summits like the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference to downplaying human rights impacts like destructive storms and emphasizing the role of fossil fuels in "economic growth"—has "undermined the protection of all human rights that are negatively impacted by climate change for over six decades," said Morgera.
Morgera pointed to three ways in which states' obligations under international humanitarian laws underpin the need for a fossil fuel phaseout by 2030:
- The survival of states that contributed minimally to climate change is impaired by loss of territory to sea-level rise and/or protracted unsafe climatic conditions;
- People are substantially deprived of their means of subsistence because of the severe deterioration of entire ecosystems due to climate change due to flooding, drought, and extreme heat; and
- The cultural survival of the populations of small island developing states, Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, peasants and small-scale fishers is impaired by loss of territories, protracted unsafe climatic conditions and/or severe ecosystem degradation.
Morgera's report was presented as more than a third of Tuvaluans applied for a visa to move to Australia under a new climate deal between the two countries, as the Pacific island is one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to rising sea levels and severe storms.
Morgera said that fossil fuel industry's impact on the human rights of people across the Global South—who have contributed little to the worsening of the climate emergency—"compels urgent defossilization of our whole economies, as part of a just, effective, and transformative transition."Keep ReadingShow Less
Environmental and Indigenous Groups Mobilize to Stop 'Alligator Alcatraz'
"This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect," said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.
Jun 30, 2025
As Florida's Republican government moves to construct a sprawling new immigration detention center in the heart of the Everglades, nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz," environmental groups and a wide range of other activists have begun to mobilize against it.
Florida's Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier, announced last week that construction of the jail, at the site of a disused airbase in the Big Cypress National Preserve, had begun. According to Fox 4 Now, an affiliate in Southwest Florida, construction has moved at "a blistering pace," with the site expected to be done by next week.
Three environmental advocacy groups have launched a lawsuit to try to halt the construction of the facility. And on Saturday, hundreds of protesters flocked to the remote site to voice their opposition.
Opponents have called out the cruelty of the plan, which comes as part of U.S. President Donald Trump's crusade to deport thousands of immigrants per day. They also called out the site's potential to inflict severe harm to local wildlife in one of America's most unique ecosystems.
Florida's government has said the site will have no environmental impact. Last week, Uthmeier described the area as a barren swampland. He said the site "presents an efficient, low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility because you don't need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out, there's not much waiting for 'em other than alligators and pythons," he said in the video. "Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide."
But local indigenous leaders have said that's not true. Saturday's protest was led by Native American groups, who say that the site will destroy their sacred homelands. According to The Associated Press, Big Cypress is home to 15 traditional Miccosukee and Seminole villages, as well as ceremonial and burial grounds and other gathering sites.
"Rather than Miccosukee homelands being an uninhabited wasteland for alligators and pythons, as some have suggested, the Big Cypress is the Tribe's traditional homelands. The landscape has protected the Miccosukee and Seminole people for generations," Miccosukee Chairman Talbert Cypress wrote in a statement on social media last week.
Environmental groups, meanwhile, have disputed the state's claims that the site will have no environmental impact. On Friday, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Everglades, and Earthjustice sued the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. They argued that the site was being constructed without any of the environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
"The site is more than 96% wetlands, surrounded by Big Cypress National Preserve, and is habitat for the endangered Florida panther and other iconic species. This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect," said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.
Governor Ron DeSantis used emergency powers to fast track the proposal, which the Center for Biological Diversity says has left no room for public input or environmental review required by federal law.
"This reckless attack on the Everglades—the lifeblood of Florida—risks polluting sensitive waters and turning more endangered Florida panthers into roadkill. It makes no sense to build what’s essentially a new development in the Everglades for any reason, but this reason is particularly despicable," said Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director and attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Reuters has reported that the planned jail could hold up to 5,000 detained migrants at a time and could cost $450 million per year to maintain. It comes as President Trump has sought to increase deportations to a quota of 3,000 per day. The majority of those who have been arrested by federal immigration authorities have no criminal records.
"This massive detention center," Bennett said, "will blight one of the most iconic ecosystems in the world."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Kristi Noem Took Personal Cut of Political Donations While Governor of South Dakota: Report
"No wonder Pam Bondi gutted the public integrity section of DOJ. To protect utterly corrupt monsters like Kristi Noem."
Jun 30, 2025
The investigative outlet ProPublica revealed Monday that Kristi Noem secretly took a personal cut of funds she raised for a nonprofit that boosted her political career—and then did not disclose the income when President Donald Trump selected her to serve as head of the Department of Homeland Security.
ProPublica reported that in 2023, while Noem was governor of South Dakota, the nonprofit group American Resolve Policy Fund "routed funds to a personal company of Noem's that had recently been established in Delaware." The company is called Ashwood Strategies, and it was registered in June 2023.
"The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary," according to the outlet. "Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group—one that's not required to disclose the names of its donors—the original source of the money remains unknown."
Experts told ProPublica that the arrangement and Noem's failure to disclose the income were unusual at best and possibly unlawful.
"If donors to these nonprofits are not just holding the keys to an elected official's political future but also literally providing them with their income, that's new and disturbing," Daniel Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who now works at the Brennan Center for Justice, told ProPublica.
Noem's lawyers denied that she violated the law but did not reply to ProPublica's questions about whether the Office of Government Ethics was aware of the $80,000 payment.
Unlike many Trump administration officials, Noem is not a billionaire. But "while she is among the least wealthy members of Trump's Cabinet, her personal spending habits have attracted notice," ProPublica observed, noting that she was "photographed wearing a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that costs nearly $50,000 as she toured the Salvadoran prison where her agency is sending immigrants."
"In April, after her purse was stolen at a Washington, D.C. restaurant, it emerged she was carrying $3,000 in cash, which an official said was for 'dinner, activities, and Easter gifts,'" the outlet continued. "She was criticized for using taxpayer money as governor to pay for expenses related to trips to Paris, to Canada for bear hunting, and to Houston to have dental work done. At the time, Noem denied misusing public funds."
Political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote Monday that it was "no wonder [Attorney General] Pam Bondi gutted the public integrity section of DOJ."
"To protect utterly corrupt monsters like Kristi Noem," he added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular