GQP Senators Cite Hysterically Inflated "Data" From API To Oppose Haaland Nomination
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Haaland, who would be the first Native American cabinet secretary, supports the Green New Deal and opposes fracking on federal land. As secretary of the interior, she would implement Biden’s climate agenda, which, though relatively ambitious, may not go as far as she would prefer. As they criticized Haaland and Biden’s stance on federal leases, two of the senators cited projected job losses from a ban on federal oil and gas extraction that came from a study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API). API is the country’s biggest oil and gas trade association and spent millions of dollars to help elect Republicans to Congress in the 2020 cycle.
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Conservationists have criticized the study. It considers a permanent ban on new and existing leases, not the current 60-day pause on only new leases, and predicts job losses over a two-year period. The energy news website DeSmog noted that for New Mexico, these predicted job losses far exceeded the total number of employees in the oil and gas extraction industry, and described the claim as “staggering”. Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, said: “In New Mexico alone, industry has a surplus of just under 500,000 acres of federal public lands leases they have not yet developed, more than 31,000 existing federal public-lands oil and gas wells, and a stockpile of more than 6,000 approved-but-unused federal public lands drilling permits.”
“This Chicken-Little routine from API and the Western Energy Alliance shouldn’t fool anyone,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a non-partisan conservation and advocacy organization. “The oil industry ‘studies’ that Barrasso and company keep citing are directly contradicted by oil executives themselves, who rightly point out to investors that they’re sitting on tens of thousands of approved drilling permits and tens of thousands more unused oil leases.”
The Western Energy Alliance is a trade group of more than 200 oil and gas companies that is suing the Biden administration over its pause on new leases. In a press release announcing the suit, it cites the API study and another study that the Western Energy Alliance secretly financed and was written by a professor who has received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation and is known for publishing industry-funded propaganda.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/04/republicans-used-oil-industry-backed-study-to-criticize-deb-haaland
