Offshore oil drilling destroys beaches, kills marine wildlife, decimates tourist and seafood industries, worsens our climate crisis, and poisons coastal and Indigenous communities.
But the fossil fuel industry doesn't care about any of that. In fact, right now they're using high gas prices to pressure our government to open up more of our shores to new drilling.
Here's the truth: Big Oil is already sitting on the drilling rights to 11 million acres of ocean — only a quarter of which they're using — and the U.S. is on track to hit all-time records on both oil and gas production this year.
New leasing would have NO impact on the current oil price crisis, as it would take at least five years for oil from new leases to reach the market.
We need your help: Submit an urgent public 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!
