Every offshore oil drilling catastrophe like the Deepwater Horizon blowout starts with a lease sale.
President Biden's Interior Department just released its five-year plan for offshore oil drilling. Once again, the Interior Department has proposed to auction off large stretches of our coastlines in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly Alaska—putting beaches, Indigenous communities, coastal communities, marine wildlife, and fishermen at grave risk of an oil spill.
We cannot allow any new oil and gas leasing off our shores to fossil fuel companies. New drilling will only shackle us to the climate-destroying fossil fuels of the past at a time when we need to rapidly transition to 100% clean energy.
Biden's Interior Department is accepting public comments on their plan, but only for a limited time. Submit an urgent comment to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland urging the Biden administration to reverse course and protect our coasts from drilling.
Dear Secretary Haaland & administration officials:
As stewards of our public waters and lands, you have a responsibility to protect our coastlines and the communities and wildlife who rely on pristine, oil-free oceans.
Therefore, I'm highly concerned with your proposal to lease off our coastlines in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly Alaska to risky, dangerous offshore oil drilling.
Just one spill could harm or kill millions of marine creatures, threaten the livelihoods of those of us who live and work along the coasts, and coat entire coastlines with a layer of crude oil that would take years, if not decades, to clean up.
The U.S. is on track to hit all-time records on both oil and gas production this year. Expanded drilling will have NO impact on rising gas prices. And fossil fuel companies have said themselves that they already have the rights to drill on enough land to sustain production for at least ten years.
Leasing our ocean to oil and gas companies will only lock us into the climate-destroying fossil fuels of the past for decades to come at a time when we need to be rapidly transitioning to 100% clean energy to save our planet.
I implore you to scrap the lease sales included in the five-year offshore drilling plan and commit to NO new lease sales instead. Thank you!
