Demanding the Obama administration align its commitments under the Paris climate agreement with its stated emission-reduction goals, dozens of environmental, indigenous and coastal conservation organizations throughout the country filed a legal petition on Tuesday calling for the end of new offshore oil and gas leases in all federally controlled oceans, including areas in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico.
The petition calls on President Obama to align federal leasing policy with U.S. climate change goals while promoting a rapid transition to a clean-energy economy, starting with a halt in offshore leasing.
Led by the Center for Biological Diversity, the 45-member coalition wants the president, using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to issue an executive order that would ban new drilling leases across more than a billion offshore acres. Such a move, the groups say, would prove that Obama is serious in his vow to curb global warming by keeping up to 62 billion tons of carbon emissions in the ground — the pollution equivalent of more than 16,000 coal-fired power plants.
The petition (pdf) comes less than a week after massive protests sought to disrupt a federal auction of offshore leases that took place at the Super Dome in New Orleans and just two weeks after Obama released the government’s five-year drilling plan. That plan was applauded for ending industry hopes that drilling would be permitted off the Atlantic Coast, but equally pilloried for retaining sizeable areas for exploration and exploitation in the Gulf and off the Arctic coast of Alaska.
According to the groups:
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