[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                           ``WHAT MORE GULF OF MEXICO 
                              OIL AND GAS LEASING MEANS 
                              FOR ACHIEVING U.S. CLIMATE  
                              TARGETS''

=======================================================================

                           OVERSIGHT HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                       SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND
                           MINERAL RESOURCES

                                 OF THE

                     COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES
                     U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                       Thursday, January 20, 2022

                               __________

                           Serial No. 117-12

                               __________

       Printed for the use of the Committee on Natural Resources

[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
                                   or
          Committee address: http://naturalresources.house.gov
          
                             __________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
46-588 PDF                 WASHINGTON : 2022                     
          
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------   
 
                     COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES

                      RAUL M. GRIJALVA, AZ, Chair
                JESUS G. ``CHUY'' GARCIA, IL, Vice Chair
   GREGORIO KILILI CAMACHO SABLAN, CNMI, Vice Chair, Insular Affairs
                  BRUCE WESTERMAN, AR, Ranking Member

Grace F. Napolitano, CA              Don Young, AK
Jim Costa, CA                        Louie Gohmert, TX
Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan,      Doug Lamborn, CO
    CNMI                             Robert J. Wittman, VA
Jared Huffman, CA                    Tom McClintock, CA
Alan S. Lowenthal, CA                Paul A. Gosar, AZ
Ruben Gallego, AZ                    Garret Graves, LA
Joe Neguse, CO                       Jody B. Hice, GA
Mike Levin, CA                       Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, AS
Katie Porter, CA                     Daniel Webster, FL
Teresa Leger Fernandez, NM           Jenniffer Gonzalez-Colon, PR
Melanie A. Stansbury, NM             Russ Fulcher, ID
Nydia M. Velazquez, NY               Pete Stauber, MN
Diana DeGette, CO                    Thomas P. Tiffany, WI
Julia Brownley, CA                   Jerry L. Carl, AL
Debbie Dingell, MI                   Matthew M. Rosendale, Sr., MT
A. Donald McEachin, VA               Blake D. Moore, UT
Darren Soto, FL                      Yvette Herrell, NM
Michael F. Q. San Nicolas, GU        Lauren Boebert, CO
Jesus G. ``Chuy'' Garcia, IL         Jay Obernolte, CA
Ed Case, HI                          Cliff Bentz, OR
Betty McCollum, MN
Steve Cohen, TN
Paul Tonko, NY
Rashida Tlaib, MI
Lori Trahan, MA

                     David Watkins, Staff Director
                       Luis Urbina, Chief Counsel
               Vivian Moeglein, Republican Staff Director
                   http://naturalresources.house.gov
                                 ------                                

              SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND MINERAL RESOURCES

                      ALAN S. LOWENTHAL, CA, Chair
                    PETE STAUBER, MN, Ranking Member

A. Donald McEachin, VA               Yvette Herrell, NM
Mike Levin, CA                       Doug Lamborn, CO
Katie Porter, CA                     Paul A. Gosar, AZ
Diana DeGette, CO                    Garret Graves, LA
Betty McCollum, MN                   Thomas P. Tiffany, WI
Jared Huffman, CA                    Bruce Westerman, AR, ex officio
Debbie Dingell, MI
Raul M. Grijalva, AZ, ex officio

                                ------                                
                                
                                CONTENTS

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page

Hearing held on Thursday, January 20, 2022.......................     1

Statement of Members:

    Lowenthal, Hon. Alan S., a Representative in Congress from 
      the State of California....................................     2
        Prepared statement of....................................     3
    Stauber, Hon. Pete, a Representative in Congress from the 
      State of Minnesota.........................................     4

Statement of Witnesses:

    Dahl, Kristina, Senior Climate Scientist, Union of Concerned 
      Scientists, Cambridge, Massachusetts.......................     6
        Prepared statement of....................................     8
        Questions submitted for the record.......................    13
    Pugliaresi, Lucian (Lou), President, Energy Policy Research 
      Foundation, Inc. (EPRINC), Washington, DC..................    31
        Prepared statement of....................................    32
        Questions submitted for the record.......................    43
    Sarinsky, Max, Senior Attorney, Institute for Policy 
      Integrity, New York University School of Law, New York, New 
      York.......................................................    20
        Prepared statement of....................................    21
        Questions submitted for the record.......................    28
    Wright, Beverly, Executive Director, Deep South Center for 
      Environmental Justice, New Orleans, Louisiana..............    14
        Prepared statement of....................................    16
        Questions submitted for the record.......................    19

Additional Materials Submitted for the Record:

    Submissions for the Record by Representative Lowenthal

        Group of Environmental Organizations and Activists, 
          Letter dated January 20, 2022 to President Biden and 
          Secretary Deb Haaland..................................    65

        Our Children's Trust, Letter dated February 3, 2022 to 
          Chair Lowenthal and Ranking Member Stauber.............    69

    Submissions for the Record by Representative Stauber

        ``Eliminating Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Leasing Will 
          Hurt U.S. Climate Achievements, Consumer Group Says,'' 
          Article dated January 19, 2022 by Consumer Energy 
          Alliance...............................................    63

 
  OVERSIGHT HEARING ON ``WHAT MORE GULF OF MEXICO OIL AND GAS LEASING 
               MEANS FOR ACHIEVING U.S. CLIMATE TARGETS''

                              ----------                              


                       Thursday, January 20, 2022

                     U.S. House of Representatives

              Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources

                     Committee on Natural Resources

                             Washington, DC

                              ----------                              

    The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:06 p.m., 
via WebEx, Hon. Alan S. Lowenthal [Chairman of the 
Subcommittee] presiding.
    Present: Representatives Lowenthal, McEachin, Levin, 
Porter, McCollum; Stauber, Herrell, Graves, and Tiffany.
    Also present: Representative Carl.

    Dr. Lowenthal. The Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral 
Resources will come to order.
    Good morning, or good afternoon, depending upon where you 
are. Welcome to the Subcommittee. We are meeting today to hear 
testimony on what additional Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leasing 
means for the United States to achieve its climate targets.
    Under Committee Rule 4(f), any oral opening statements at 
hearings are limited to the Chair and the Ranking Minority 
Member, or their designee. This will allow us to hear from our 
witnesses sooner and help Members to keep to their schedules. 
Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that all other Members' 
opening statements be made part of the hearing record if they 
are submitted to the Clerk by 5 p.m. today, or at the close of 
this hearing, whichever comes first.
    Hearing no objection, so ordered.
    Without objection, the Chair may also declare a recess, 
subject to the call of the Chair.
    Without objection also, the Member from Alabama, 
Representative Carl, is authorized to question the witnesses in 
today's hearing.
    As described in the notice, statements, documents, or 
motions must be submitted to the electronic repository at 
[email protected].
    Additionally, please note that as with in-person meetings, 
Members are responsible for their own microphones. As with our 
in-person meetings, Members can be muted by staff only to avoid 
inadvertent background noise.
    Finally, Members or witnesses experiencing technical 
problems should inform Committee staff immediately.
    With that, I will begin with my opening statement.

 STATEMENT OF THE HON. ALAN S. LOWENTHAL, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
             CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

    Dr. Lowenthal. The Earth's 7 hottest years on record have 
all occurred since 2015. And 2021 was the ocean's hottest, and 
that was for the third year in a row. With a rapidly warming 
climate, the Biden administration must chart a course that 
leads the world to achieve our emissions reduction goals. And 
while the Administration has taken numerous positive steps, and 
is moving in the right direction, good is not nearly enough.
    At the last Subcommittee hearing in December, we looked at 
the climate implications of fossil fuel production on public 
lands which was managed by the Department of the Interior. 
Today's hearing is an opportunity to look at the offshore lands 
in the Gulf of Mexico, where the vast majority of Federal 
leasing occurs.
    Both Congress and the Biden administration must do more to 
ensure that the management of our public waters aligns with the 
commitment to reduce emissions 52 percent from 2005 levels by 
2030 and to achieve economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050.
    But the November Gulf of Mexico lease sale and the Interior 
Department's leasing report demonstrates that the Biden 
administration has not yet found the political courage 
necessary to confront the realities of climate change. We need 
the Administration to act boldly, but they don't have to go it 
alone. They have allies in Congress and across the country 
ready to help them undertake this challenge of reducing our 
emissions.
    Federal oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico produces 
nearly 20 percent of all carbon dioxide pollution from public 
lands and waters each year. The Gulf also spews out about 20 
percent of all methane emissions from public lands and waters. 
Oil and gas companies have stockpiled over 9 million acres of 
non-producing leases off our coastline. Yet, the Biden 
administration used the June preliminary injunction as an 
excuse to sell off another 1.7 million acres to the oil and gas 
industry during a recent lease sale in November.
    I strongly disagree with the Department's decision making 
around this sale and found it particularly disappointing, given 
the extensive commitments to address climate change that were 
made in Glasgow at the COP26 Climate Conference. Secretary 
Haaland must ensure her Department accurately accounts for the 
damage that carbon pollution from leasing causes, and she must 
develop a long-term strategy to reduce emissions from all 
existing and new leases, starting with the next 5-year leasing 
plan due out later this year.
    While many of my colleagues and I are passionate supporters 
of the Administration, we will continue to push them to follow 
the science and use the tools at their disposal to reduce 
emissions from America's public lands and waters.
    Reducing emissions from fossil fuel production has been an 
area of bipartisan agreement on this Subcommittee, and I hope 
that we can discuss that shared goal during today's hearing.
    Despite some claims otherwise, we know that reducing 
emissions from oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will 
help reduce overall carbon emissions.
    Research shows that, on average, eliminating one barrel of 
U.S. oil supply decreases--and I point that out--decreases 
global supply by about half a barrel. To put it simply, we can 
successfully reduce oil and gas leasing here in the United 
States without driving up emissions because of increased 
production overseas.
    In addition to combating climate change, limiting fossil 
fuel leasing and extraction in Federal waters will yield 
enormous health benefits for the communities that call the Gulf 
Coast region home.
    For too long, the Gulf Coast has been treated as a 
sacrifice zone. The fossil fuel industry has been allowed to 
contaminate the water and air, causing disease and 
disproportionately high cancer rates. Gulf Coast communities 
are also on the front lines of climate change and sea level 
rise, erosion, flooding, and more powerful storms will continue 
to wreak havoc unless and until we reduce our emissions.
    And we must reduce our emissions. Failure to do so will 
spell disaster for our climate and those Americans most 
impacted by the fossil fuel industry's toxic pollution.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Lowenthal follows:]
 Prepared Statement of the Hon. Alan S. Lowenthal, a Representative in 
                 Congress from the State of California
    The Earth's seven hottest years on record have all occurred since 
2015, and 2021 was the ocean's hottest for the third year in a row.
    With a rapidly warming climate, the Biden administration must chart 
a course that leads the world to achieve our emission reduction goals.
    And while the administration has taken numerous positive steps and 
is moving in the right direction, good is not nearly enough.
    At the last Subcommittee hearing in December, we looked at the 
climate implications of fossil fuel production on public lands managed 
by the Department of the Interior.
    Today's hearing is an opportunity to look offshore to the Gulf of 
Mexico, where the vast majority of federal leasing occurs.
    Both Congress and the Biden administration must do more to ensure 
that the management of our public waters aligns with the commitment to 
reduce emissions 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 and achieve 
economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050.
    But the November Gulf of Mexico lease sale and the Interior 
Department's leasing report demonstrates that the Biden administration 
has not yet found the political courage necessary to confront the 
realities of climate change.
    We need the administration to act boldly, but they don't have to go 
it alone. They have allies in Congress and across the county ready to 
help them undertake this challenge of reducing our emissions.
    Federal oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico produces nearly 
20 percent of all carbon dioxide pollution from public lands and waters 
each year. The Gulf also spews out about 20 percent of all methane 
emissions from public lands and waters.
    Oil and gas companies have stockpiled over 9 million acres of non-
producing leases off our coastlines. And yet the Biden administration 
used the June preliminary injunction as an excuse to sell off another 
1.7 million acres to the oil and gas industry during the recent lease 
sale in November.
    I strongly disagree with the Department's decision-making around 
this sale and found it particularly disappointing given the extensive 
commitments to addressing climate change that were made in Glasgow at 
the COP26 Climate Conference.
    Secretary Haaland must ensure her Department accurately accounts 
for the damage the carbon pollution from leasing causes. And she must 
develop a long-term strategy to reduce emissions from all existing and 
new leases, starting with the next 5-year leasing plan due out later 
this year.
    While many of my colleagues and I are passionate supporters of the 
administration, we will continue to push them to follow the science and 
use the tools at their disposal to reduce emissions from America's 
public lands and waters.
    The stakes are just too high for the health of our planet and 
future generations for us to maintain the status quo.
    Reducing emissions from fossil fuel production has been an area of 
bipartisan agreement on this Subcommittee, and I hope that we can 
discuss that shared goal during today's hearing.
    Despite some claims otherwise, we know that reducing emissions from 
oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will help reduce overall 
carbon emissions.
    Research shows that, on average, eliminating one barrel of U.S. oil 
supply decreases global supply by about half a barrel. To put it 
simply, we can successfully reduce oil and gas leasing here in the 
United States without driving up emissions because of increased 
production overseas.
    In addition to combating climate change, limiting fossil fuel 
leasing and extraction in federal waters will yield enormous health 
benefits for the communities that call the Gulf Coast region home.
    For too long, the Gulf Coast has been treated as a sacrifice zone. 
The fossil fuel industry has been allowed to contaminate the water and 
air, causing disease and disproportionally high cancer rates.
    Gulf Coast communities are also on the front lines of climate 
change, and sea-level rise, erosion, flooding, and more powerful storms 
will continue to wreak havoc until we reduce our emissions.
    And we must reduce our emissions. Failure to do so will spell 
disaster for our climate and those Americans most impacted by the 
fossil fuel industry's toxic pollution.

                                 ______
                                 

    Dr. Lowenthal. With that, I look forward to the testimony 
of our witnesses, and I now recognize Ranking Member Stauber 
for his opening remarks.
    Welcome, Ranking Member.

    STATEMENT OF THE HON. PETE STAUBER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
              CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MINNESOTA

    Mr. Stauber. Thank you, Chairman Lowenthal, and thank you 
to the witnesses for joining us virtually today.
    Before we begin, I want to take a moment to recognize my 
good friend and colleague, Chairman Lowenthal, who announced 
his retirement since we last had an EMR meeting. Although it 
has only been a year since I have been fortunate enough to be 
Ranking Member alongside him, I have grown to really appreciate 
his demeanor when leading this Committee. Therefore, I 
certainly look to Mr. Lowenthal's leadership style as a strong 
template in how to conduct Committee business. I couldn't be 
happier for Alan and his family. Energy and Mineral Resources 
will miss him. But Long Beach, California is fortunate to have 
him back full-time.
    And with that, I would like to welcome everyone back from a 
busy Christmas and holiday season. Apparently, my colleagues on 
the other side of the aisle are choosing to pick up right where 
we left off, discussing emissions.
    Just like previous hearings, the Majority is making an 
active choice to include U.S. in the title, and consciously 
choosing to ignore a holistic, global view of carbon because 
the Majority knows, just as well as we do, that the cleanest 
energy in the world is produced in America, whether it be 
Federal lands onshore or offshore.
    Between 2005 and 2020, the United States decreased its 
CO2 emissions by 24 percent, while global emissions 
grew by 14 percent. Today, I look forward to joining my 
colleagues from the Gulf, Mr. Graves and Mr. Carl, in sharing 
the good news about how the oil and gas producers in the Gulf 
are leading the charge on reducing emissions.
    But just don't take our word for it. Ask President Obama's 
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, who, in a 2016 report, 
stated U.S. emissions would be higher if BOEM were to have no 
lease sales. Emissions from substitutions are higher due to 
exploration, development, production, and transportation of oil 
from international sources being more carbon intensive.
    That is right, Mr. Chair. It is a fact that a barrel of oil 
from the Gulf or elsewhere in America is far and away cleaner 
than our rival exporters like OPEC, plus Russia, or even 
Canada. And President Obama's Interior Department recognized 
that. In fact, the Gulf specifically decreased emissions by 
more than 8 percent from 2013 to 2019, which coincides with an 
unprecedented increase in American oil and gas export and 
production.
    This fact bears repeating. While America increased oil and 
gas production and exports, we decreased our emissions, with 
Gulf operators leading the way.
    And despite this unprecedented success, President Biden 
listened to his radical base and banned oil and gas development 
on his very first day in office, contributing to skyrocketing 
gas prices and crippling inflation. This was, of course, 
illegal, and the courts, like they have a couple of times now 
under this Administration, rightfully have mandated lease 
sales.
    Through gritted teeth, the Interior Department finally 
released its ``early summer oil and gas report'' in November 
and held its court-mandated lease, the Sale 257 in the Gulf of 
Mexico. Lease Sale 257 was a resounding success, generating 
roughly $200 million in bonus bids, illustrating a clear market 
desire for more Gulf oil and gas.
    And we are putting these resources to good use. Homes in my 
district, where temperatures have already touched 36 degrees 
below zero, rely on the natural gas-powered energy grid for 
electricity and natural gas and propane for direct heating to 
keep their homes heated and comfortable.
    All of this can be derived from our own resource. We can 
make sure Minnesotans and the Mississippi headwaters can heat 
their homes during sub-zero temperatures with affordable energy 
from American resources originating in the Gulf of Mexico at 
the south end of the river.
    And not only does this lease sale illustrate the continued 
demand we have for oil and gas, but this means restoration of 
conservation funding. Whether it be bonus bids or royalties, 
revenue sharing of oil and gas funds allows for a good chunk of 
the money to stay in the Gulf states, focusing on projects like 
coastal resiliency, while disseminating the rest throughout the 
country.
    Do you have a national park in your district, or one that 
you care about? Well, then you should support oil and gas 
leasing in the Gulf. Much of the royalties goes to fund those 
national parks.
    So, let's be clear about what we are talking about when we 
consider oil and gas development in the Gulf. We are talking 
about affordable energy, low emissions, and funding for our 
treasured conservation efforts. Therefore, I look forward to 
more lease sales. I look forward to producing more American 
energy for our homes and businesses. And I look forward to 
funding conservation.
    Thank you very much, Chairman Lowenthal, and I yield back 
to you.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Ranking Member Stauber, for your 
opening remarks.
    I am wondering, is Ranking Member Westerman on this 
Subcommittee hearing? If he is here, would he like to make a 
statement?
    Mr. Stauber. Mr. Chair, Ranking Member Westerman is not on 
the hearing, so there will be no opening statement.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you. Now I will introduce today's 
witnesses.
    Dr. Kristina Dahl is a Senior Climate Scientist for the 
Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned 
Scientists.
    Dr. Beverly Wright is the Founder and Executive Director of 
the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Dr. Wright is 
also an environmental justice scholar, an author, and professor 
of sociology.
    Dr. Max Sarinsky is a Senior Attorney at the Institute for 
Policy Integrity, housed at the New York University School of 
Law, where he is also an adjunct professor.
    And Mr. Lucian Pugliaresi--I hope I haven't mangled that--
is the President of the Energy Policy Research Foundation.
    Let me remind the witnesses that, under our Committee 
Rules, they must limit their oral statements to 5 minutes, but 
that their entire statement will appear in the hearing record.
    When you begin, the timer will start, and it will turn 
orange when you have 1 minute remaining. I recommend that 
Members and witnesses joining remotely use the stage view so 
they may pin the timer on their screen.
    After your testimony is complete, please remember to mute 
yourself to avoid any inadvertent background noise.
    I will also allow the entire panel to testify before 
questioning the witnesses.
    The Chair now recognizes Dr. Dahl for 5 minutes.
    Welcome to the Committee, Dr. Dahl.

STATEMENT OF KRISTINA DAHL, SENIOR CLIMATE SCIENTIST, UNION OF 
         CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

    Dr. Dahl. Chairman Lowenthal, Ranking Member Stauber, and 
members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to 
testify today about the implications of additional oil and gas 
leasing in the Gulf of Mexico. My name is Dr. Kristina Dahl, 
and I am a Senior Climate Scientist at the Union of Concerned 
Scientists.
    I spent the last decade of my career working to understand 
how climate change will affect communities across the United 
States and how the choices we make today will shape the world 
that we ultimately pass along to our children and 
grandchildren. The message I would like to communicate to you 
today is this: We have precious little time to affect a 
wholesale shift in how we power our lives and our economy, if 
we wish to avert the most dangerous consequences of climate 
change. We are decades late in making that shift, so any 
increases in our heat-trapping emissions will make the narrow 
chance we have of averting those consequences even slimmer.
    The Federal Government can and must align its actions with 
what is needed to meet the climate challenge and, therefore, 
must not apply business-as-usual thinking to energy-related 
decisions, including those relating to leasing Federal lands in 
the Gulf of Mexico.
    The cumulative result of every energy-related decision for 
the last 150 years is that we are now struggling to cope with a 
climate that is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree 
Celsius, warmer than it was at the start of the 20th century. 
In the United States in 2021 alone, heat waves claimed the 
lives of some of the most vulnerable among us. Wildfires 
crossed the spine of the Sierra Nevada twice and made the air 
we breathe toxic for thousands of miles downwind. Hurricanes 
intensified at an unbelievable pace before leaving 1,000-mile-
long trails of destruction. During these and many other 
climate-related events in 2021, we watched as infrastructure 
built for the climate of our ancestors failed and as people 
lost their homes and their lives.
    Recognizing that the consequences of climate change would 
be devastating with continued warming, in 2015 the United 
States and other signatories of the Paris Agreement committed 
to pursuing efforts to limit future warming to 1.5 degrees 
Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The science now tells us 
that to have just a 50/50 chance of staying within that limit, 
nations around the world can only collectively emit another 500 
gigatons of carbon dioxide. That is our collective carbon 
budget. At the current global pace of emissions, we are in 
danger of exceeding that budget and reaching the 1.5 degree C 
mark within the next 10 to 20 years.
    To ensure that warming does not exceed 1.5 degrees C, use 
of all fossil fuels, including oil and gas, must decline 
significantly and quickly. The United States has committed to 
reducing fossil fuel use, and such reductions could be at least 
partially achieved by expedited passage by Congress of the 
Build Back Better Act. Yet, in November 2021, with that package 
stalled in Congress, the U.S. Government opened more than 80 
million acres of Federal lands in the Gulf of Mexico for oil 
and gas leases that could produce up to 1.2 billion barrels of 
oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the next 50 
years. As a rough estimate, the full combustion of those 
products would release an estimated .76 gigatons of carbon 
dioxide, equivalent to about 16 percent of the Nation's fossil 
fuel emissions for 1 year.
    Phasing out our use of fossil fuels is about much more than 
securing our climate goals. Spills from drilling equipment in 
the Gulf of Mexico have affected the environment and ecosystems 
repeatedly and tragically for decades, and Gulf Coast residents 
have lost their livelihoods and experienced long-lasting health 
problems because of these spills.
    Given that climate change is expected to increase the 
intensity of hurricanes, and given the prevalence of hurricanes 
in the Gulf of Mexico, siting yet more drilling infrastructure 
within the Gulf could place additional health burdens on 
residents living alongside and suffering from the output of 
fossil fuel facilities.
    The science is clear, that surpassing the 1.5 degree C 
temperature target would be disastrous. Science has also shown 
us that that temperature target translates into a specific 
carbon budget that, in turn, necessitates sharp reductions in 
fossil fuel use and systemic shifts in our energy system. We 
must, therefore, assess our energy investments holistically, 
not as one-offs, to ensure the smoothest possible transition to 
cleaner forms of energy.
    With the stakes so high, continuing with lease sales in the 
Gulf of Mexico without taking the time to fully interrogate 
whether or how the enabled extraction will fit within our 
Nation's future is both reckless and irresponsible. Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Dahl follows:]
  Prepared Statement of Dr. Kristina Dahl, Senior Climate Scientist, 
                     Union of Concerned Scientists
    Chairperson Lowenthal, Ranking Member Stauber, and members of the 
subcommittee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify today 
about the climate implications of additional oil and gas leasing in the 
Gulf of Mexico. My name is Dr. Kristina Dahl, and I am a senior climate 
scientist in the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned 
Scientists. I have spent the last decade of my career working to 
understand how climate change will affect communities across the United 
States and how the choices we make today will shape the world that we 
ultimately pass along to our children and grandchildren.
    The research my colleagues and I at the Union of Concerned 
Scientists have done and the research of thousands of dedicated 
scientists around the world makes clear that the ability for people, 
plants, and animals to thrive now and in the future depends on our 
ability to rein in heat-trapping emissions both nationally and 
globally. And indeed, future generations will be the inheritors of the 
choices we make today.
    In my testimony today, I will address the current state of our 
climate; the current state of national and global emissions with a 
particular eye toward contributions from the oil and gas sector; the 
latest science on how emissions will need to decrease globally to limit 
dangerous levels of climate change; and the implications of increased 
oil and gas production for our climate, our health, the environment in 
which we live, and the ecosystems on which we depend.
    We have precious little time to effect a wholesale shift in how we 
power our lives and our economy if we wish to avert the most dangerous 
consequences of climate change. We are decades late in making that 
shift, and we now find ourselves in a position where any additional 
increases in our heat-trapping emissions will make the narrow chance we 
have of averting those consequences even slimmer. The federal 
government can and must align its actions with what is needed to meet 
the climate challenge and therefore must not apply business-as-usual 
thinking to energy-related decisions, including those relating to 
leasing federal lands in the Gulf of Mexico.
Climate change is here, and it is a product of human activity

    Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration (NASA) released reports summarizing the state of our 
climate that serve as sobering reminders that we have already begun to 
live with the effects of climate change and that our society is 
underequipped for its consequences. Scientists at these agencies found 
that 2021 was the sixth-warmest year on record for the globe, with an 
average temperature of 1.5+F (0.84+C) above the 20th-century average, 
and that the last eight years have been the eight warmest since 
recordkeeping began in 1880.\1\ The anomalously warm years we have 
experienced recently are the product of the decades-long warming trend 
that has resulted from human emissions from the burning of coal, oil, 
and gas.2,3 At present, the average temperature of the Earth 
is about 1.8+F (1.0+C) warmer than the 1850-1900 average.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/202113
    \2\ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/
IPCC_AR6_WGI_Headline_ Statements.pdf
    \3\ https://blog.ucsusa.org/kristy-dahl/new-noaa-data-shows-just-
how-abnormal-our-climate-has-become/
    \4\ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/
IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The consequences of that warming were felt acutely around the world 
in 2021, including here at home in the United States, where 20 extreme 
weather and climate-related disasters causing $1 billion or more in 
damages cost at least $145 billion last year alone and claimed a record 
number of lives--nearly 700.\5\ More than 40% of US residents live in 
counties that experienced climate-related disasters in 2021,\6\ and 
millions of people experienced the toxic air from wildfires, power 
outages resulting from extreme heat or cold, or devastating floods. And 
this doesn't even capture the full toll--for example, the hundreds of 
deaths from the extreme heatwave in the Pacific Northwest last year are 
not included in that total.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \5\ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/overview
    \6\ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/05/
climate-disasters-2021-fires/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The climate extremes we and others around the world have been 
experiencing bear the fingerprints of human-caused climate change. The 
heat waves that have become more frequent and intense, the hurricanes 
that intensify rapidly and dump record-breaking amounts of rain, and 
the wildfires of unprecedented scale are all in line with our 
expectations of how extreme weather and climate-related events respond 
to higher concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere that 
result from the burning of fossil fuels.
    Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s to 
today, our collective burning of fossil fuels (primarily coal, oil, and 
gas) has emitted 2,390 gigatonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), 
with each gigatonne equaling one billion tonnes, or about twice the 
mass of all the people on Earth.\7\ The United States alone is 
responsible for nearly 25% of all historical emissions \8\ despite 
being home to just 4% of the world's population today,\9\ which means 
that we bear a disproportionately large responsibility for the 
emissions and warming we as a planet have incurred.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \7\ https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Gigatonne#cite_note-1
    \8\ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-
historically-responsible-for-climate-change
    \9\ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In terms of annual emissions, the United States was the top 
emitter--by far--until the year 2006, when China's annual emissions 
began to exceed those of the United States.\10\ While our total annual 
emissions are currently about half those of China's,\11\ our per capita 
emissions are more than twice those of China.\12\ The burning of oil 
and gas for US energy purposes accounted for the vast majority (81%) of 
total U.S. emissions in 2019 (the remaining 19% of energy-related 
emissions were derived from burning coal).\13\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \10\ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57483492
    \11\ https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-
emissions
    \12\ http://energyatlas.iea.org/#!/tellmap/1378539487/4
    \13\ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-
environment/where-greenhouse-gases-come-from.php
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In 2020, production on offshore federal lands amounted to 642 
million barrels of oil (16% of all domestic oil production) and 910 
million cubic feet of gas (3% of all domestic natural gas 
production).\14\ Most of this offshore production takes place in the 
Gulf of Mexico.\15\ Notably, however, the area of the Gulf of Mexico 
under lease has declined significantly over the last decade and 55% of 
leased acreage is non-producing, which indicates that the current 
leased acreage should be sufficient to meet demand for years to 
come.\16\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \14\ https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/report-on-the-federal-
oil-and-gas-leasing-program-doi-eo-14008.pdf
    \15\ https://www.boem.gov/regions/gulf-mexico-ocs-region/oil-and-
gas-gulf-mexico
    \16\ http://energyatlas.iea.org/#!/tellmap/1378539487/4
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Recent assessments of the full life cycle of oil, meaning from the 
time of production through the refining and transportation stages and 
the consumption or burning of that fuel, showed that the pre-
consumption stages (producing, refining, and transportation) are 
responsible for between 10% and 30% of the full life cycle 
emissions.\17\ Similarly, those pre-consumption stages for gas account 
for between 15% and 40% of the fuel's full life cycle emissions.\18\ A 
significant portion of the emissions from oil and gas therefore comes 
from the consumption of those fuels for transportation, industrial, 
residential, and commercial purposes.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \17\ https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2018/oil-and-
gas-innovation
    \18\ https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1485127
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Swift and deep emissions cuts are needed to limit future warming

    Global and national climate assessments along with thousands of 
individual scientific studies point to an even more dire future if we 
fail to rein in our heat-trapping emissions.
    Drawing on the best available science, the global community--
including the United States--pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement to 
``holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 
2+C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the 
temperature increase to 1.5+C above pre-industrial levels'' to help 
limit the risks and impacts of climate change.\19\ To cap global 
warming at any specific level, whether that is 1.5+C, 2+C, or any other 
target, we must reach net-zero emissions, meaning that any remaining 
emissions of heat-trapping gases are balanced by removals of in the 
same amount.\20\ And to stay at or below a specific temperature target, 
we must stay within a specific carbon budget. In other words, we can 
only emit so much more carbon before we exceed dangerous thresholds of 
warming.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \19\ https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/
english_paris_agreement.pdf
    \20\ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/
IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    On our current trajectory and with the current pledges from nations 
party to the Paris Agreement, the planet is on track to warm by at 
least 4.3+F (2.4+C) by the end of the century.\21\ As just one example 
among myriad examples of what that warming implies for the US, the 
number of dangerously hot days across the country is projected to 
double between now and midcentury if we are slow to act to reduce 
global heat-trapping emissions.\22\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \21\ https://climateactiontracker.org/press/Glasgows-one-degree-
2030-credibility-gap-net-zeros-lip-service-to-climate-action/
    \22\ https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ab27cf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The relationship between our cumulative global emissions of 
CO2 and global temperature is roughly linear: increased 
emissions, resulting in higher concentrations of CO2 in the 
atmosphere, translate directly to higher global temperatures.\23\ This 
strong relationship allows us to estimate that to have a 50% chance of 
limiting future warming to 1.5+C above preindustrial temperatures, 
nations around the world can only collectively emit another 500 
GtCO2.\24\ Giving ourselves an 85% chance of meeting that 
1.5+C goal would mean emitting even less than that--just 300 
GtCO2.\25\ Total global CO2 emissions currently 
amount to roughly 36 GtCO2 per year (Global Carbon Project 
via Carbon Brief), which means that we are in danger of reaching the 
1.5+C mark within the next 10 to 20 years.\26\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \23\ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/
IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf
    \24\ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/
IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf
    \25\ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/
IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf
    \26\ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/
IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Staying below the 1.5+C mark--that is, not overshooting it at any 
point--requires us to decrease emissions quickly. The best available 
science suggests that we must reduce global CO2 emissions by 
about 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions around 
2050.\27\ Emissions of other heat-trapping gases, such as methane, will 
need to decline along similarly steep pathways. Achieving these 
emissions reductions will mean significantly curtailing our fossil fuel 
use as quickly as possible.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \27\ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Scientific modeling has shown that in most scenarios in which we 
are able to limit warming to 1.5+C above preindustrial levels, use of 
all fossil fuels, including oil and gas, must decline significantly 
28,29 To meet global energy demand, those declines must be 
coupled with a commensurate increase in energy efficiency and renewable 
energy, with renewables supplying 90% or more of our electricity in 
2050.30,31 And numerous studies show that these investments 
in efficiency and clean energy will more than pay off, especially when 
evaluated against the prohibitive costs of runaway climate change and 
the steep public health burden of fossil fuels.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \28\ https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2021
    \29\ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (2.4.2)
    \30\ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (2.4.1, 2.4.2, 2.4.3)
    \31\ https://www.iea.org/news/pathway-to-critical-and-formidable-
goal-of-net-zero-emissions-by-2050-is-narrow-but-brings-huge-benefits
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The energy investments we make now will have repercussions for 
decades to come. Research suggests that developing the energy-related 
technologies and infrastructure consistent with a 1.5+C pathway will 
require investment in clean energy technologies and energy efficiency 
to overtake fossil investments by around 2025.\32\ Furthermore, the 
International Energy Agency--among the world's leading energy 
organizations--has found that reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 would 
require having ceased investment in new fossil fuel supply projects as 
of last year.\33\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \32\ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (2.5.2)
    \33\ https://www.iea.org/news/pathway-to-critical-and-formidable-
goal-of-net-zero-emissions-by-2050-is-narrow-but-brings-huge-benefits
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The United States is committed to substantial and necessary emissions 
        reductions

    The Biden Administration has committed the US to a 50-52% reduction 
in national heat-trapping emissions below 2005 levels by 2030, and to 
putting the nation on a path to net-zero emissions by midcentury.\34\ 
Such reductions mirror the global emissions cuts necessary for capping 
warming at 1.5+C above preindustrial levels and there is a case to be 
made that the US's outsized contribution to global emissions 
historically and per capita demands that we shoulder a larger share of 
the global emissions reductions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \34\ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/
2021/04/22/fact-sheet-president-biden-sets-2030-greenhouse-gas-
pollution-reduction-target-aimed-at-creating-good-paying-union-jobs-
and-securing-u-s-leadership-on-clean-energy-technologies/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Achieving a 50% reduction in national emissions by 2030 will 
require bold action, resolute vision, and an exacting attention to the 
consequences of every energy-related decision we make going forward. 
And so we must bring that exacting attention and the best available 
science to our understanding of the consequences of opening up new 
leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands.
    Research by energy and transportation experts at the Union of 
Concerned Scientists indicates that deep cuts in heat-trapping 
emissions are feasible, both within this decade and continuing through 
2050, in line with rigorous climate targets.\35\ To achieve these 
reductions, though, every sector of the economy must shift, including 
through widespread uptake of energy efficiency, end-use 
electrification, and carbon-free energy. With currently available 
technologies, a viable solution set to achieving the US's stated 
emissions-reduction commitments is within our grasp today. The system 
costs of this transition are comparatively modest--and easily 
outweighed when compared to the benefits of improved health and avoided 
climate impacts. However, delaying necessary near-term action, 
including emissions reductions that could be achieved by expedited 
passage by Congress of the Build Back Better package--or further 
entrenching ourselves in a fossil-fuel-based economy--is costly and 
risks stranding assets, foreclosing some solutions pathways, and 
probably falling short of climate goals.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \35\ https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/A-
Transformative-Climate-Action-Framework.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The implications of additional oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico

    In November 2021, the US government opened up more than 80 million 
acres of offshore federal land--an area larger than the state of New 
Mexico--in the Gulf of Mexico for lease sales. Within days, fossil fuel 
corporations had bid a combined $192 million for drilling rights on 
nearly two million of those acres.\36\ It is likely to be several years 
before these areas are producing oil or gas, which means that they'd be 
coming online late this decade when emissions from fossil fuels must be 
in a steep decline to meet the US's climate goals.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \36\ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/days-after-climate-
talks-u-s-to-hold-huge-crude-sale-in-the-gulf-of-mexico
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) estimates that the 
area recently opened for lease sales could produce up to 1.2 billion 
barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the next 
50 years.\37\ Using the Environmental Protection Agency's Greenhouse 
Gas Equivalency guidelines, the combustion of those products would 
release an estimated 0.76 GtCO2 with 0.52 GtCO2 
resulting from oil combustion and 0.24 GtCO2 resulting from 
gas combustion. In 2019, US fossil-fuel emissions totaled 4.7 
GtCO2.\38\ With this rough estimate and assuming no other 
changes in US fossil fuel sourcing or use, the potential emissions from 
the areas recently opened to leasing therefore represent about 16% of 
the nation's fossil-fuel emissions for one year.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \37\ https://www.boem.gov/sites/default/files/documents/oil-gas-
energy/GOM-LS-257.pdf
    \38\ https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-
emissions
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    While the potential emissions from these Gulf of Mexico lease sales 
may seem limited,\39\ viewing them in isolation fundamentally 
mischaracterizes the cumulative and collective action challenge of 
climate change. It will take joint efforts by all nations to address 
the scale of the climate challenge--each contributing their fair share, 
cutting emissions across every sector of their economies, so that 
together we can meet science-based emission reduction goals. It is the 
cumulative result of each energy-related decision that has been made by 
nations over the last century and half that we are now struggling to 
cope with our already-altered climate. In this warmer climate, heat 
waves claim the lives of the most vulnerable among us--those who 
harvest our food,\40\ our elderly parents and grandparents,\41\ people 
who have no home in which to cool off.\42\ Wildfires cross the spine of 
the Sierra Nevada \43\ and make the air we breathe toxic for thousands 
of miles downwind.\44\ Hurricanes intensify at an unbelievable pace 
\45\ before slamming into the coast claiming lives along a 1,000-mile 
path.\46\ Deadly heatwaves follow on the heels of hurricanes,\47\ 
wildfire smoke exacerbates a pandemic's ravages on our health,\48\ and 
infrastructure built for the climate of our ancestors fails.\49\ And 
this is only considering impacts in the US.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \39\ ``Each 1,000 GtCO2 of cumulative CO2 emissions is assessed to 
likely cause a 0.27+C to 0.63+C increase in global surface temperature 
with a best estimate of 0.45+C'' (IPCC AR6)
    \40\ https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/03/oregon-heat-wave-
deaths-farm-workers-sebastian-francisco-perez-vigil/
    \41\ https://www.kuow.org/stories/heat-wave-death-toll-in-
washington-state-jumps-to-112-people
    \42\ https://www.koin.com/news/special-reports/new-data-shows-
scope-of-heatwave-related-homeless-deaths/
    \43\ https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Giant-Dixie-Fire-
first-ever-to-burn-its-way-clear-16396141.php
    \44\ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/21/new-york-air-
quality-plunges-smoke-west-coast-wildfires
    \45\ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-climate-rapid-
intensification-revved-up-hurricane-ida/2021/08/31/cfb0b5be-0a63-11ec-
a7c8-61bb7b3bf628_story.html
    \46\ https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/ida-aftermath-09-02-21/
index.html
    \47\  https://weather.com/news/news/2021-09-09-heat-hurricane-ida-
new-orleans-louisiana-power-outages
    \48\ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/08/wildfire-smoke-
linked-to-increase-in-covid-19-cases-and-deaths/
    \49\ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/14/winter-weather-texas-
climate-change/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Spills from oil drilling equipment have profoundly affected marine 
environments and ecosystems repeatedly and tragically for decades. Ten 
years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, 
researchers have found that there is still a substantial amount of oil 
in the sediment at the bottom of the gulf; that reproduction rates of 
fish and dolphins near the spill site remain low; and that fish in the 
gulf remain contaminated with oil-related toxins.\50\ An estimated 
600,000 to 800,000 birds died because of the spill.\51\ People, too, 
have suffered in the wake of the spill. In addition to the 11 Deepwater 
Horizon workers\52\ who lost their lives when the rig exploded and 
sank, Gulf Coast residents experienced the loss of their livelihoods as 
well as health problems--including headaches, shortness of breath, 
depression, and anxiety--for years after the spill.\53\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \50\ https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/msc_facpub/877/
    \51\ https://usa.oceana.org/reports/time-action-six-years-after-
deepwater-horizon/
    \52\ https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/deepwater-horizon-bp-gulf-
mexico-oil-spill
    \53\ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5932154/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Human health also suffers as oil and gas are processed or refined 
and transported. Communities located near oil refineries and 
petrochemical facilities exhibit higher rates of a wide range of 
cancers, including brain and lung cancer.\54\ They are also at risk of 
immune system suppression resulting from exposure to harmful 
chemicals.\55\ Threats to health from fossil fuel facilities along the 
Gulf Coast rise acutely during and after hurricanes, when accidents, 
emergency shutdowns, and restarts lead to the release of toxic 
chemicals into the air and water.\56\ These threats are particularly 
acute in communities of color \57\ because centuries of systemic racism 
have led to a constriction of living options and resources \58\ as well 
as the deliberate siting of industrial facilities in and around these 
neighborhoods.\59\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \54\ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/
S0013935120303881
    \55\ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/
09603123.2019.1689232
    \56\ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/
S030438940701477X
    \57\ https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/env.2020.0052
    \58\ https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-
94.58&text=intro
    \59\ https://news.umich.edu/targeting-minority-low-income-
neighborhoods-for-hazardous-waste-sites/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The ramifications of failures in drilling infrastructure can be 
long lasting. Seventeen years after a mudslide triggered by Hurricane 
Ivan caused a Taylor Energy oil platform to sink, the undersea wells 
that had been broken open as a result were still seeping oil into the 
Gulf.\60\ Given that climate change is expected to increase the 
intensity of hurricanes \61\ and given the prevalence of hurricanes in 
the Gulf of Mexico,\62\ siting additional drilling infrastructure 
within the Gulf poses long-term hazards to the region.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \60\ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/climate/taylor-energy-oil-
spill-gulf.html
    \61\ https://archive.ipcc.ch/report/srex/
    \62\ https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/#map=2/60.49/-
23.25&search=eyJzZWFyY2hTdHJpbmci 
OiJOb3J0aCBBdGxhbnRpYyBPY2VhbiBCYXNpbiIsInNlYXJjaFR5cGUiOiJiYXNpbiIsImNh
d 
GVnb3JpZXMiOlsiSDUiLCJINCIsIkgzIiwiSDIiLCJIMSIsIlRTIiwiVEQiLCJFVCJdLCJ5Z
WFy 
cyI6W10sIm1vbnRocyI6W10sImVuc28iOltdLCJwcmVzc3VyZSI6eyJyYW5nZSI6WzAsMTE1
MF 
0sImluY2x1ZGVVbmtub3duUHJlc3N1cmUiOnRydWV9LCJidWZmZXJVbml0IjpbIk1pbGVzIl
0 
sInNvcnRTZWxlY3Rpb24iOnsidmFsdWUiOiJ5ZWFyc19uZXdlc3QiLCJsYWJlbCI6IlllYXI
gKE5 
ld2VzdCkifSwiYXBwbHlUb0FPSSI6ZmFsc2UsImlzU3Rvcm1MYWJlbHNWaXNpYmxlIjp0cn 
VlfQ==
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Sharply phasing down our use of fossil fuels and securing our 
climate goals is about much more than cutting carbon emissions. By 
looking beyond carbon to all the ways in which our fossil fuel-based 
economy affects people, ecosystems, and the environment in which we 
live, we can unlock new opportunities for progress.\63\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \63\ https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/A-
Transformative-Climate-Action-Framework.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion

    Human activity has warmed the Earth by about 1+C over the last 
century and people are already suffering in a multitude of ways as a 
result. The science is clear that the consequences of surpassing the 
1.5+C temperature target would be disastrous, the consequences of 
surpassing the 2+C temperature target almost unimaginable. Science has 
also shown us that those temperature targets translate into specific 
carbon budgets that, in turn, necessitate sharp reductions in fossil 
fuel use and systemic shifts in our energy system. Each of these pieces 
points to the urgent need to assess our energy investments 
holistically, not as one offs, to ensure the smoothest, best possible 
transition to cleaner forms of energy. With the stakes so high, there 
is no room for business-as-usual thinking when it comes to our energy-
related decisions, including those regarding lease sales in the Gulf of 
Mexico. Continuing with lease sales without taking the time to fully 
interrogate whether or how the enabled extraction will fit with our 
nation's future is reckless and irresponsible.

                                 ______
                                 

Questions Submitted for the Record to Dr. Kristina Dahl, Senior Climate 
                Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists

             Questions Submitted by Representative Huffman
    Question 1. Dr. Dahl, in 2020, researchers at the University of 
Michigan found that oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico have a 
2.9 percent natural gas loss rate, meaning platforms were leaking twice 
as much methane as the EPA estimates. According to the researchers, 
this is because of undercounting offshore platforms, higher emissions 
from shallow-water facilities, and a small number of sporadic super-
emitting incidents. Can you speak to the human health and climate 
impacts of methane emissions?

    Answer.

    Dear Representative Huffman,

    Thank you for reaching out to me with your question about the human 
health and climate impacts of methane emissions following the January 
20, 2022, hearing on oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico. I hope 
the response I provide below is helpful but would be happy to follow up 
with you or your staff if you have additional questions relating to the 
impacts of greenhouse gas emissions or climate change.
    Methane is the primary component of natural gas and methane 
emissions have important implications for our climate and for human 
health. While methane is much less abundant than CO2 in our 
atmosphere, it's a much more potent heat-trapping gas. Methane 
emissions to date are responsible for about 30% of the warming we've 
experienced over the last 150 years. That said, the lifetime of methane 
in the atmosphere is relatively short--about 10 years. After that 
point, most emitted methane will have broken down to form water and 
CO2, which will continue warming the planet for hundreds of 
years.
    The more we learn about methane and its impacts on our climate, the 
worse the picture is and the higher the emissions are than we have 
previously understood. Moreover, EPA estimates are likely significantly 
undercounting methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. With this 
in mind, is critically important to fully consider the implications of 
oil and gas extraction on methane emissions.
    While the bigger beast to tackle is our long-term CO2 
emissions, reducing methane emissions here and now could help us to 
reach our 2030 climate goals. Notably and intuitively, oil and gas 
operations account for more than a quarter of all methane emissions, so 
as we pursue reductions in fossil fuel production and use, we would 
expect methane emissions to decline as well.
    Because methane emissions contribute to the overall warming of our 
planet, they influence human health. Rising temperatures are associated 
with more frequent, more intense heatwaves; stronger hurricanes; larger 
wildfires; more frequent floods; and less predictability in our water 
systems. Each of these climate impacts poses a risk to our health, with 
the risks expected to grow as we continue to alter our climate.
    Methane also has indirect impacts on our health because it is a 
precursor formation of ground-level ozone, which can cause respiratory 
problems, damage our airways, and worsen asthma and other lung 
diseases. Children, older adults, and people who work outdoors are 
particularly at risk. Methane is also often released along with a host 
of other toxic chemicals, like hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and 
formaldehyde. These pollutants increase the risks of cancer, immune 
system problems, neurological and reproductive issues, and other health 
problems.

    Thank you again for your question and for your service to our 
shared home state of California.

                                 ______
                                 

    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Dr. Dahl. The Chair now 
recognizes Dr. Wright for 5 minutes of testimony.
    Welcome, Dr. Wright.
    [Pause.]
    Dr. Lowenthal. Dr. Wright, I believe you are muted.
    Dr. Wright. Clearly, I am, yes.

  STATEMENT OF BEVERLY WRIGHT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DEEP SOUTH 
    CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

    Dr. Wright. Thank you to the Energy and Mineral Resources 
Subcommittee for holding this hearing and inviting me today. My 
name is Dr. Beverly Wright, Executive Director of the Deep 
South Center for Environmental Justice and co-founder of the 
Center for nearly 30 years in the city of New Orleans, 
Louisiana.
    At the Center, we partner with communities who are harmed 
by environmental racism and face serious climate threats in the 
Gulf Coast region. We provide education and research, as well 
as policy and legal assistance that support communities to 
effectively engage in governmental decisions affecting their 
health and wellness. Our worker training program in six states 
prepares unemployed and underemployed people to obtain state 
certifications for environmental careers. And this year, we 
will host the Eighth Annual HBCU Climate Change Consortium, 
which I co-direct with Dr. Robert Bullard from Texas Southern 
University. This gathering prepares more than 300 students at 
32 HBCUs to contribute to climate solutions through scientific 
research they conduct and present at the annual HBCU Climate 
Change Conference.
    I am here today not just as a scholar and advocate, but as 
a Black mother and a decades-long resident of New Orleans, 
Louisiana. I have seen and felt firsthand the effects of 
climate change, environmental racism, and policies that favor 
the oil and gas industry over the health and safety of Black 
children and families. I have seen eroding pipes in Black 
neighborhoods covered in oil, Black residents displaced from 
homes that have been in their families for decades, Black-owned 
small businesses and restaurants struggling because of a 
seafood industry on the brink of ruin from oil spills and 
extreme weather.
    As you consider the question at hand, I want you all to 
remember that economic gain does not outweigh the devastation 
we are feeling right now, particularly Black communities. In 
2019, the Environmental Protection Agency published a report 
that found the petroleum sector released over 11 million pounds 
of pollution in 25 Louisiana parishes, with many of these 
facilities operating in close proximity to Black residents. 
Within this pollution were chemicals widely known to cause 
cancer and damage heart and lung functions, making it difficult 
to breathe and leading to premature death. And now, as studies 
show that air pollution exacerbates the impacts of COVID-19, 
the threat oil and gas facilities pose to our communities is 
magnified.
    Simply put, these communities are in double jeopardy, 
facing exposure to the pollution and destruction to their 
homes. If we don't take action soon, they face a triple 
jeopardy of extinction.
    Following the BP oil drilling disaster, massive amounts of 
oil waste were dumped in landfills next to Black communities, 
jeopardizing our water supplies. And as offshore drilling 
continues, our coastlines are deteriorating, leaving areas 
without natural defenses to extreme weather events. To make 
matters worse, greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas 
industry are massive contributors to the climate crisis, which 
disproportionately affects our communities.
    I want you to take a hard look at this map.
    [Slide.]
    Dr. Wright. These are the oil and gas pipelines that exist 
today throughout the Gulf Coast region. We are inundated. We 
can't even make out the outline of my home state through what 
looks like a picture of human veins and arteries. Is this not 
enough? More of what is bad for you is not better for you.
    President Biden has made it clear that reforming the 
leasing system is a leading priority. While detractors framed 
the Administration's pause on new leases as stopping progress 
while the source of gas price is rising, it presented an 
opportunity to review the system and create a transition from 
fossil fuel development that is both environmentally and 
economically just. The pause was for research, to take a look 
at the impact of the leases that already exist.
    Simply put, the State of Louisiana vs. Biden litigation 
continues necessary, time sensitive research. We must take 
advantage of this moment to act properly and carefully with 
environmental justice at the center for decision making.
    I call upon you as Members of Congress to work alongside us 
to make this a reality by: (1) mandating the targeted 
reductions in a way that is equitable for communities of color 
that have been suffering for so long; and (2) requiring an 
annual impact analysis from the Department of Energy studying 
how the oil and gas industry is affecting the community's 
health, wellness, and the very land they call home.
    There is a lot of work to be done. The environmental 
justice community is up to the task, and we hope you will join 
us in this work, because our lives depend on it.
    Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Dr. Wright follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Beverly Wright, Founding Executive Director, 
              Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
    Good afternoon Chairperson Lowenthal, Ranking Member Stauber, and 
members of the Subcommittee. I am Beverly Wright, and I am the founding 
executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice 
in New Orleans, Louisiana.\1\ At the Center, we work to improve the 
lives of children and families harmed by pollution and vulnerable to 
climate change in the Gulf Coast Region. We do this through education, 
research, community engagement, and worker training programs. We foster 
collaborative projects among communities, students, scientists, and 
policymakers that promote the right of all people to be free from 
environmental harm as it impacts health, jobs, housing, education, and 
quality of life. I appreciate this opportunity to provide testimony on 
the impacts of oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and what more 
leasing means for achieving U.S. climate targets.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ Beverly Wright Curriculum Vitae, Appendix 1.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Impacts of Oil and Gas Leasing in the Gulf of Mexico

    For more than 80 years, oil and gas leases have been issued off the 
coast of Louisiana.\2\ In this time, Indigenous communities have lost 
forested lands to ongoing coastal erosion brought on by the extensive 
network of oil and gas pipelines.\3\ Historic Black communities have 
been vacated due to toxic exposures and contamination from inland oil 
refineries and petrochemical industries.\4\ Over the course of 30 
years, oil and gas leasing and all the infrastructure for drilling 
platforms, pipelines, and industrial facilities were firmly established 
before Black people gained the right to vote.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ See U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management 
Service, Gulf of Mexico OCS Region, History of the Offshore Oil and Gas 
Industry in Southern Louisiana, September 2008, vol. 1, p. 30, 
available at https://espis.boem.gov/final%20reports/4530.pdf (noting 
that in 1936 Louisiana leased a combined 33,000 acres offshore to the 
Pure Oil Company and the Superior Oil Company).
    \3\ Saskia de Melker and Melanie Saltzman, ``Native American 
Community Relocates as Land Washes Away,'' PBS News Hour, July 30, 
2016, available at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/native-community-
louisiana-relocates-land-washes-away.
    \4\ Bullard, Robert D., Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and 
Environmental Quality, Boulder: Westview Press, 1994 (documenting the 
lost Black communities of Reveilletown, Sunrise, and Morrisonville in 
Louisiana); Lerner, Steve, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental 
Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006; 
Heather Rogers, ``Erasing Mossville: How Pollution Killed a Louisiana 
Town,'' The Intercept, November 4, 2015, available at https://
theintercept.com/2015/11/04/erasing-mossville-how-pollution-killed-a-
louisiana-town/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    For more than 50 years, the oil and gas industry has dominated the 
Gulf Coast Region to the detriment of Black communities engulfed in the 
massive amounts of toxic pollution from oil refining and the 
manufacturing of plastics from oil and gas feedstocks. In the 2019 
Toxic Release Inventory, the petroleum sectors report the release of 11 
million pounds of pollution in 25 Louisiana parishes. Much of this 
pollution is released from multiple facilities located in close 
proximity to Black residents. These facilities release chemicals in the 
air that are scientifically known to cause cancer as well as damage 
heart and lung functions which make it difficult to breathe and cause 
premature death.
    Black communities are disproportionately exposed to oil and gas 
operations, where the view from windows is oil and gas storage tanks, 
oil refinery smokestacks, or gas-fired power plants. A national report 
by the NAACP found that over 1 million Black people in the United 
States live within a half mile of at least one oil or gas facility and 
in areas where pollution from these facilities exceeds EPA's cancer 
risk guidelines.\5\ This report is further confirmation of the 
connection between pollution and race and the existence of 
environmental racism, which is well documented in reports by 
governmental and non-governmental entities. The source of oil and gas 
pollution in Black communities are the oil and gas leases in the Gulf 
of Mexico.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \5\ NAACP, Fumes Across the Fenceline: Fumes Across the Fence-Line: 
The Health Impacts of Air Pollution from Oil & Gas Facilities on 
African American Communities, 2017, available at https://naacp.org/
resources/fumes-across-fence-line-health-impacts-air-pollution-oil-gas-
facilities-african-american.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    With each hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, there is growing concern 
regarding the lack of preparedness and response to oil spills and other 
industrial hazards. Even air monitoring is mired in resistance by some 
state governments to collect and share data on toxic releases during a 
disaster.\6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \6\ Mark Schleifstein, ``Louisiana refineries, chemical plants 
flaring at full blast; 15 air monitors knocked out,'' The Times-
Picayune/NOLA.com, September 2, 2021, available at https://
www.nola.com/news/environment/article_6c017212-0c2d-11ec-b3ff-
3b08d3c3460d.html; Susan Rust and Louis Sahagun, ``Post-Hurricane 
Harvey: NASA tried to fly a pollution-spotting plane over Houston. The 
EPA said no,'' The Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2019, available at 
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-nasa-jet-epa-hurricane-
harvey-20190305-story.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    There is a massive array of pipelines and platforms in shallow and 
deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico. See below Graphic: Detailed Map of 
Active Oil and Gas Leases and Infrastructure as of May 2021, prepared 
by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement 
(BOEMRE).\7\ The map below does not include the recent federal offshore 
leases that occurred in November 2021 in which companies placed bids on 
1.7 million acres.\8\ According to BOEMRE, a total of approximately 11 
million acres of the Gulf of Mexico are now subject to active 
leases.\9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \7\ Graphic map with zoom functions available at https://
www.boem.gov/sites/default/files/documents/about-boem/Visual-1-Active-
Leases-and-Infrastructure_2.pdf.
    \8\ Nathan Rott, ``The Biden Administration Sold Oil and Gas Leases 
Days after the Climate Summit,'' NPR News, Nov. 17, 2021, available at 
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/17/1056713397/the-biden-administration-
sold-oil-and-gas-leases-days-after-the-climate-summit.
    \9\ BOEMRE, Combined Leasing Report as of January 1, 2022, 
available at https://www.boem.gov/sites/default/files/documents//
Lease%20stats%201-1-22.pdf.

[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T6588.016


    Pursuant to a lease, the exploration for oil and gas typically 
involves seismic activity that harms marine ecosystems. The discovery 
of oil or gas leads to production requiring transport via pipeline or 
vessels to refineries where oil spills or gas leaks can result in 
contamination, fires, or explosions. The BP oil spill disaster in 2010 
involved the exploration for oil in the deep waters of the Gulf of 
Mexico which caused the biggest environmental disaster in US history. 
BP responded to the spill in ways that magnified the damage with toxic 
air emissions, the use of harmful chemicals to disperse the oil, and 
disposal in landfills located in close proximity to Black 
communities.\10\ The BP oil spill disaster claimed the lives of eleven 
people, injured seventeen, and wreaked havoc on the health and 
livelihoods of Gulf Coast residents.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \10\ Nance, Earthea, King, D., Wright, B. and Bullard, R.D., 
Ambient Air Concentrations Exceeded Health-Based Standards for PM2.5 
and Benzene during the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill,'' Journal of Air 
and Waste Management, 2016.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Poor oversight of oil and gas activities in the Gulf of Mexico has 
resulted in more than 27,000 abandoned wells without regular monitoring 
on the ocean floor of federal waters and another 3,200 wells without 
any plugging to prevent leaks.\11\ These wells leak methane and other 
gases that contribute to the climate crisis. A former BOEM employee 
explained that notwithstanding requirements for plugging these wells, 
ensuring the requirements are met are ``beyond the scope and capability 
of the resources the agency has.'' \12\ Toxic air pollution, 
contamination, soil degradation, damage to ecosystems, and risk of 
explosions are impacts of abandoned wells that threaten human health 
and sustainability. The environmental risks do not go away with wells 
that are considered properly plugged. Rusting, re-pressurization, and 
failures with the plug itself can give rise to environmental impacts 
from plugged wells.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \11\ Jeff Donn and Mitch Weiss, ``Gulf Awash in 27,000 Abandoned 
Wells,'' NBC News, July 6, 2010, available at https://www.nbcnews.com/
id/wbna38113914; Jeff Donn, ``High Risk in Multitude of Abandoned 
Wells,'' Sarasota Herald-Tribune, April 21, 2011, available at https://
www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/2011/04/21/high-risk-in-multitude-of-
unplugged-wells/29011603007/.
    \12\ Hannah Seo, ``Unplugged: Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells Leave the 
Ocean Floor Spewing Methane,'' Environmental Health News, December 8, 
2020, available at https://www.ehn.org/oil-and-gas-wells-methane-
oceans-2649126354/particle-8.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oil and Gas Leases Do Not Include Climate Targets
    The purpose of US climate targets is to protect human life and 
stave off planetary destruction from climate change. These targets come 
years after mounting damage to human health and environment caused by 
exposure to toxic chemicals, which are co-pollutants released with 
greenhouse gases from industrial smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes. The 
climate targets essentially call for reducing greenhouse gas emissions 
by 50-52 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030. However, meeting 
the climate targets is not a mandate for oil, gas or other fossil fuel 
companies or the users of fossil fuels. The targets are not included in 
the terms of the offshore oil and gas leases that were recently issued 
in November 2021. The oil and gas companies that have leased new acres 
of the Gulf of Mexico can operate as if the climate crisis does not 
exist. Each lease that finds a producing well moves us further away 
from, not closer to, meeting the climate targets.
    Notwithstanding the damaging effects of oil and gas leases on 
Louisiana communities and the environment, the State of Louisiana along 
with 12 other state governments won a federal court ruling last year 
that blocks the application of US climate targets to offshore oil and 
gas leases. The preliminary injunction removes the federal pause on 
leasing that is set forth in President Biden's Executive Order 14008, 
which calls for an all of government approach to tackling climate 
change and delivering environmental justice.\13\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \13\ Louisiana v. Biden, 2-21-cv-0078, Western District of 
Louisiana, June 15, 2021.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The major loss from the court's preliminary injunction is the 
important work undertaken by the Department of the Interior, pursuant 
to the Executive Order, to assess the wide-ranging impacts of offshore 
oil and gas operations. Completing this assessment is central to the 
task of meeting US climate targets by informing the direction of the 
Interior's leasing program to ensure environmental justice and deliver 
equitable climate solutions. There can be no meaningful assessment to 
meet climate targets with the continued leasing of millions of more 
acres for oil and gas development.
Conclusion

    I have discussed above how oil and gas leases are not required to 
meet US climate targets and have given rise to the massive 
environmental harms that are disproportionately felt by Black and 
Indigenous communities in the Gulf Coast Region. While there are 
environmental regulations, they have proven to be inadequate to protect 
the health and safety of communities from toxic chemicals. Similarly, 
climate targets by themselves are inadequate to reduce greenhouse 
gases.

    Given the state we are now in where there is precious little time 
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to stave off the worst effects of 
climate change, it is critical that committee members consider 
solutions for meeting US climate targets. I strongly recommend the 
following:

  1.  establish compliance with US climate targets for the oil and gas 
            industry;

  2.  require health protections for communities harmed by the 
            extraction, transport, burning, and disposal of fossil 
            fuels;

  3.  prohibit racially disproportionate pollution burdens;

  4.  expand the reach of the Superfund responsible parties to 
            compensate the clean up and plugging of abandoned wells, as 
            well as the regular monitoring of all existing wells;

  5.  stand up an expert federal team for disaster planning, 
            preparedness and response on oil spills and other 
            industrial hazards resulting from hurricanes in the Gulf of 
            Mexico; and

  6.  hold companies accountable for abandoned wells in the Gulf of 
            Mexico.

                                 ______
                                 

  Questions Submitted for the Record to Dr. Beverly Wright, Executive 
         Director, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
            Questions Submitted by Representative Lowenthal
    Question 1. Dr. Wright, during the hearing you were not given an 
adequate chance to respond to the questions and statements leveraged 
against you. Would you like to respond to anything said to you by a 
Republican Member of Congress during today's hearing?

    Answer. First, I live with racism every day and have for as long as 
I can remember. It's insulting to try and deny the systemic steps that 
have been taken to ensure the communities most impacted by pollution 
are communities of color. Cherry-picking data by only looking at white 
parishes where a small number of people live is not an accurate 
representation of the suffering that has gone on for so long in Cancer 
Alley. The facts and data are clear, there has been a disproportionate 
impact of pollution on African American communities in Louisiana, and 
race is a primary determinate in where polluting facilities are placed.
    The states' own demographics show that African Americans are 
overrepresented in the pollution corridor. The GIS maps show that 80 
percent of African Americans in the state live within three miles of a 
cancer-causing facility. This isn't an accident, it's the result of 
skewed decision-making and environmental racism.

             Questions Submitted by Representative Huffman
    Question 1. Dr. Wright, in November, the Biden Administration made 
80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico available to the fossil fuel 
industry for leasing, and companies ended up purchasing leasing 
covering 1.7 million acres. What was your response to this sale, and do 
you think an adequate environmental review and analysis was completed 
for the lease sale?

    Answer. I don't think there was an adequate environmental review, 
and since our hearing, a federal judge has reversed the decision. Our 
position remains that the entire federal leasing process should be 
reviewed to better account for its impact on all communities. Until the 
administration has had time to review the system, they must extend the 
pause on new leases.

    Given the state we are now in where there is precious little time 
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to stave off the worst effects of 
climate change, it is critical that committee members consider 
solutions for meeting U.S. climate targets. I strongly recommend the 
following:

  1.  Require health protections for communities harmed by the 
            extraction, transport, burning, and disposal of fossil 
            fuels;

  2.  prohibit racially disproportionate pollution burdens;

  3.  expand the reach of the Superfund responsible parties to 
            compensate the cleanup and plugging of abandoned wells, as 
            well as the regular monitoring of all existing wells;

  4.  stand up an expert federal team for disaster planning, 
            preparedness and response on oil spills and other 
            industrial hazards resulting from hurricanes in the Gulf of 
            Mexico;

  5.  hold companies accountable for abandoned wells in the Gulf of 
            Mexico; and

  6.  establish compliance with US climate targets for the oil and gas 
            industry.

                                 ______
                                 

    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Dr. Wright. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Sarinsky for 5 minutes.
    Welcome to the Committee, Mr. Sarinsky.

   STATEMENT OF MAX SARINSKY, SENIOR ATTORNEY, INSTITUTE FOR 
POLICY INTEGRITY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW, NEW YORK, 
                            NEW YORK

    Mr. Sarinsky. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Chairman 
Lowenthal, Ranking Member Stauber, and members of the 
Committee. And thank you for this opportunity to testify at 
this critical hearing. I am a senior attorney at the Institute 
for Policy Integrity, which is a non-partisan think tank 
dedicated to improving the quality of government decision 
making using law and economics. We are housed at New York 
University School of Law, where I also serve as an adjunct 
professor.
    Federal oil and gas policy should be guided by the best 
available science and economics. Unfortunately, however, 
previous Interior analyses have typically undervalued the 
environmental impacts of fossil fuel leasing and extraction on 
public lands in at least three different ways. Interior has 
broad discretion to reconsider its oil and gas policies, and in 
doing so it should be guided by the best available data and 
science.
    First, Interior has previously concluded that offshore oil 
and gas production reduces total greenhouse gas emissions. But 
this conclusion ignores basic economics, has been rejected by 
Federal courts, and has now been disclaimed by Interior itself.
    The reason why Federal leasing increases greenhouse gas 
emissions is, in fact, quite intuitive and simple, because it 
increases fossil fuel usage and production and combustion 
overall. While some have claimed that fossil fuel production on 
Federal lands merely substitutes for production that would 
otherwise occur elsewhere, that hypothesis ignores fundamental 
economics. As one appellate court stated in rejecting this 
assumption, ``Such an assumption is contrary to basic supply 
and demand principles.''
    In an evaluation this past October for an upcoming lease 
sale, Interior corrected for the modeling errors identified by 
the courts and concluded that proposed offshore leasing in the 
Cook Inlet would result in more than 30 million metric tons of 
additional surplus climate pollution. Thus, Interior now 
rejects its prior claim that offshore leasing reduces 
emissions. And as discussed in my written testimony, moreover, 
Interior still continues to underestimate the climate pollution 
from offshore leasing due to other continuing modeling 
limitations.
    Second, even when Interior has acknowledged that Federal 
leasing contributes to climate change, it has typically 
characterized those emissions as insignificant by noting that 
Federal leasing represents a relatively small fraction of all 
national or global greenhouse gas emissions. But the 
implication of such logic is that nobody should ever do 
anything to mitigate the climate crisis, which, as a Federal 
court explained in rejecting this very logic, ``would be a 
prescription for climate disaster.''
    In reality, the Federal oil and gas program is responsible 
for millions upon millions of tons of climate pollution each 
and every year, which greatly exacerbates the climate crisis 
and cannot be ignored. Reducing these emissions would be an 
important piece of meeting the Nation's emission reduction 
targets.
    Third, Interior has typically ignored the considerable 
option value of delaying leasing decisions. Developers already 
have vast resources of both productive and currently non-
producing fossil fuel leases, such that there is little short-
term need or economic benefit to further leasing at this time. 
Against such a backdrop there is considerable value in 
curtailing fossil fuel leasing now, and preserving the option 
to lease or not lease in the future, particularly given that 
continued growth of renewable energy is likely to render 
extensive future leasing unnecessary.
    Interior should be guided by this information moving 
forward. If the government properly considered energy 
substitution, the social cost of greenhouse gases, and option 
value, fossil fuel leasing would look less attractive and 
determinations that Interior currently justifies under its 
flawed methodologies would become unjustifiable.
    Moreover, if the government properly considered the climate 
harms of the fossil fuel program, it would adjust fiscal terms 
to eliminate the billions of dollars in annual subsidies that 
it provides to the oil and gas industry.
    In short, the Federal fossil fuel program greatly increases 
greenhouse gas emissions, severely harming both present and 
future generations of Americans. Federal land use policy should 
no longer be based on contrary conclusions that Federal courts 
have rejected time and again. Instead, the Federal Government 
should reform oil and gas leasing to account for climate harms 
and refocus its land use policy toward facilitating a necessary 
transition to a renewable economy.
    I thank the Committee for this opportunity and look forward 
to answering your questions.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Sarinsky follows:]
  Prepared Statement of Max Sarinsky, Senior Attorney, Institute for 
 Policy Integrity; Adjunct Professor, New York University School of Law
    Thank you for the opportunity to speak at this important hearing. I 
am a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity (``Policy 
Integrity''), a non-partisan think tank dedicated to improving the 
quality of government decisionmaking. Policy Integrity is housed at New 
York University School of Law, where I am also an adjunct professor.
    Policy Integrity is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to 
improving the quality of government decisionmaking through advocacy and 
scholarship in the fields of administrative law, economics, and public 
policy. We have written extensively on the consideration of greenhouse 
gas emissions and other environmental impacts in oil, gas, and coal 
leasing.
    As this committee and the Department of Interior assess the future 
of oil and gas leasing on federal waters and lands, they should be 
guided by the best available science and economics. Unfortunately, 
previous Interior analyses have typically undervalued the environmental 
impacts of the federal fossil-fuel programs. Interior has broad 
discretion to reconsider its oil and gas policies and practices, and in 
doing so, it should be guided by the best available data and science.
    First, Interior has previously concluded that offshore oil and gas 
production reduces total greenhouse gas emissions. But this conclusion 
has been rejected by independent analyses and federal courts, and 
should not form the basis for leasing policy. In reality, the federal 
oil and gas program is responsible for millions upon millions of tons 
of greenhouse gas emissions each year.
    Second, even when Interior has acknowledged that federal leasing 
contributes to climate change, it has characterized those contributions 
as insignificant. But framing large volumes of emissions as a small 
portion of total global or national emissions, as Interior has done, is 
not a reasonable basis for decisionmaking, and masks the program's 
substantial climate harms. Available tools, such as the social cost of 
greenhouse gases, could be used to measure the climate costs of the 
federal program and account for climate change in program policies.
    Third, Interior has typically ignored the considerable ``option 
value'' of delaying leasing. Fossil-fuel leasing today affects 
extraction for decades to come and causes irreversible climate damage. 
Yet developers already have vast reserves, such that there is little 
short-term need or economic benefit to further leasing at this time. 
Against this backdrop, there is considerable value in curtailing 
fossil-fuel leasing now and preserving the option to lease or not lease 
in the future, particularly as the continued growth of renewable energy 
could render unnecessary extensive future leasing.
    Interior should be guided by this information moving forward, and 
restore rationality to the oil and gas leasing program. For one, if the 
government properly considered energy substitution, the social cost of 
greenhouse gases, and option value, fossil-fuel leasing would look less 
attractive and determinations that Interior currently justifies under 
its flawed methodologies would become unjustifiable. Second, if the 
government properly considered the climate harms of the fossil-fuel 
program, it would eliminate subsidies to the oil and gas industry by 
adjusting fiscal terms.
    In short, the federal fossil-fuel program greatly increases global 
greenhouse gas emissions, severely harming present and future 
generations of Americans. Federal land-use policy should no longer be 
based on contrary conclusions that courts have rejected. Instead, the 
federal government should reform oil and gas leasing to account for 
climate harms, and refocus land-use policy toward facilitating a 
necessary transition to a renewable economy.
I. The Department of Interior Has Broad Discretion to Reform the Oil 
        and Gas Program to Account for Climate Damage

    Congress passed three primary statutes granting the Bureau of Land 
Management (``BLM'') and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (``BOEM'') 
authority to manage onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing. There are 
two primary onshore leasing statutes: the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 
(``MLA''),\1\ and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 
(``FLPMA'').\2\ Offshore leasing is subject to the Outer Continental 
Shelf Lands Act (``OCSLA'').\3\ These statutes all grant Interior broad 
authority to manage public waters and lands for the public interest, 
requiring rational balancing of competing uses.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ 30 U.S.C. Sec. 181 et seq.
    \2\ 43 U.S.C. Sec. 1701 et seq.
    \3\ Id. Sec. 1331 et seq.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    OCSLA governs the development of fossil fuel resources in the Outer 
Continental Shelf.\4\ The statute requires BOEM to balance the 
production of oil and gas with ``protection of the human, marine, and 
coastal environments.'' \5\ BOEM is required to consider the 
environmental risks of oil and gas development in offshore areas.\6\ In 
deciding whether to lease any portion of the Outer Continental Shelf, 
BOEM must ensure a ``proper balance between the potential for 
environmental damage, the potential for the discovery of oil and gas, 
and the potential for adverse impact on the coastal zone.'' \7\ BOEM is 
not required to make any particular or amount of parcels available for 
fossil-fuel development.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \4\ Id.
    \5\ Id. Sec. 1802.
    \6\ Id. Sec. 1344(a)(2)(A), (H).
    \7\ Id. Sec. 1344(a)(3).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The provisions in FLPMA are intended to work in tandem with those 
in the MLA. FLPMA provides BLM with an overarching framework for 
managing federal lands ``on the basis of multiple use and sustained 
yield.'' \8\ These multiple uses include, but are not limited to, 
``recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, 
and natural scenic, scientific and historical values.'' \9\ Under 
FLPMA, BLM must manage public land uses ``in the combination that will 
best meet the present and future needs of the American people,'' \10\ 
and is also not required to make any particular or amount of lands 
available for fossil-fuel development.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \8\ Id. Sec. 1701(a)(7).
    \9\ Id. Sec. 1702(c).
    \10\ Id.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In carrying out its statutory mandates, Interior must balance 
positive and adverse impacts of oil and gas development, including 
harms to climate change that arise from the program. For example, under 
FLPMA, BLM is required to ``weigh long-term benefits to the public 
against short-term benefits'' when formulating regional management 
plans.\11\ Similarly, under OCSLA, BOEM must weigh the ``economic, 
social, and environmental values of the . . . resources contained in 
the outer Continental Shelf.'' \12\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \11\ Id. Sec. 1712(c)(7).
    \12\ Id. Sec. 1344(a)(1).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As these provisions illustrate, Interior has broad authority to 
manage public lands for the public benefit, and the consideration of 
environmental values is critical to this consideration.
II. In Assessing the Oil and Gas Program, Regulators Should Be Guided 
        by the Best Available Science and Reject Implausible or 
        Discredited Theories

    While federal law requires Interior to base its policies on 
reasonable information and assumptions, previous Interior analyses have 
substantially undervalued the environmental impacts of fossil-fuel 
extraction on public lands, often relying on disproven methodologies or 
irrational assumptions. Such false narratives should no longer form the 
basis for federal policy.
    In particular, in recent years Interior has operated under the 
following assumptions: (1) energy production on federal property, 
particularly offshore, can reduce total greenhouse gas emissions; (2) 
any greenhouse gas emissions that do result from federal leasing and 
planning determinations are likely insignificant; and (3) there is, at 
most, limited option value to curtailing leasing despite the vast 
reserve of existing leases. As detailed below, all three of these 
assumptions are irrational and discredited by independent analysis.
A. Fossil-Fuel Extraction on Federal Waters and Lands Increases Total 
        Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    The notion that fossil-fuel extraction on federal lands does not 
affect--or even decreases--total greenhouse gas emissions has been 
widely rejected by both federal courts and independent analysis, and 
should not form the basis for leasing policy.
    At times, the Department of Interior has claimed that fossil-fuel 
leasing would have no impact on downstream greenhouse gas emissions, on 
the theory that extraction occurring on federal lands perfectly 
substitutes for alternative oil and gas development that would 
otherwise occur. But courts on numerous occasions have rejected this 
``perfect substitution'' assumption as irrational and counter to basic 
market dynamics, as an increase in supply is bound to result in an 
increase in production and consumption.\13\ In 2017, the U.S. Court of 
Appeals for the Tenth Circuit rejected a BLM leasing decision that 
assumed perfect substitution, finding the assumption ``contrary to 
basic supply and demand principles.'' \14\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \13\ See, e.g., Mid States Coal. for Progress v. Surface Transp. 
Bd., 345 F.3d 520, 549 (8th Cir. 2003) (``[T]he proposition that the 
demand for [energy] will be unaffected by an increase in availability . 
. . is illogical at best.'').
    \14\ WildEarth Guardians v. BLM, 870 F.3d 1222, 1236 (10th Cir. 
2017).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In its most recent five-year plan, BOEM did not exactly assume 
perfect substitution, but instead used a model (known as MarketSim) 
that concluded that extraction in federal waters would decrease total 
greenhouse gas emissions. In essence, MarketSim found that oil and gas 
extraction in federal waters only modestly increased total extraction 
while displacing production in areas that would have yielded greater 
emissions to transport the energy to its end destination.\15\ But that 
model was based on irrational inputs and assumptions, and courts have 
since rejected BOEM's conclusion that offshore extraction reduces 
greenhouse gas emissions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \15\ BOEM, OCS Oil and Natural Gas: Potential Lifecycle Greenhouse 
Gas Emissions and Social Cost of Carbon 26 (2016); see also Liberty 
Development and Production Plan Final Environmental Impact Statement 4-
52 (2018) (``Here, life cycle GHG emissions associated with the No 
Action Alternative are estimated to be higher than those associated 
with the Proposed Action, despite the model's assumption that a 
slightly lower amount of energy would be consumed domestically 
overall.'')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently held, 
BOEM's analysis improperly omitted impacts on foreign oil demand 
resulting from domestic oil production.\16\ Specifically, the Court 
explained, MarketSim ``fail[s] to include emissions estimates resulting 
from foreign oil consumption'' and thereby irrationally ``assumes that 
foreign oil consumption will remain static'' when domestic production 
increases.\17\ As the Court explained, this ignores the global nature 
of the energy market and violates ``basic economics principles'' about 
supply and demand.'' \18\ The Court pointed to ``credible scientific 
evidence'' demonstrating that ``domestic consumption impacts foreign 
oil consumption, and increases in foreign oil consumption can be 
translated into estimates of greenhouse gas emissions,'' including one 
study concluding that offshore development ``cause[s] an increase in 
global oil consumption ten times greater than the increase in domestic 
consumption forecasted by BOEM.'' \19\ The U.S. District Court for the 
District of Alaska echoed these findings in a subsequent decision 
vacating a BLM development plan that relied on the same modeling.\20\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \16\ Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. Bernhardt, 982 F.3d 723, 736-
40 (9th Cir. 2020).
    \17\ Id.
    \18\ Id.
    \19\ Id. (citing Peter Erickson, U.S. Again Overlooks Top CO2 
Impact of Expanding Oil Supply, but That Might Change, Stockholm Env't 
Inst. (Apr. 30, 2016), http://www.sei.org/perspectives/us-co2-impact-
oil-supply; Peter Erickson & Michael Lazarus, Impact of the Keystone XL 
Pipeline on Global Oil Markets and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 4 Nature 
Climate Change 778, 778-80 (2014); Jason Bordoff & Trevor Houser, 
Columbia SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy, Navigating the U.S. Oil 
Export Debate 57 (2015)).
    \20\ Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic v. BLM, No. 3:20-CV-
00290-SLG, 2021 WL 3667986, at *10-14 (D. Alaska Aug. 18, 2021).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In fact, in its most recent analysis for Lease Sale 258, published 
in October 2021 following the Ninth Circuit and District of Alaska 
decisions, BOEM corrected for the modeling error identified by the 
courts and concluded that the proposed offshore leasing in the Cook 
Inlet would result in more than 30 million metric tons of additional 
climate pollution.\21\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \21\ BOEM, Revised Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Cook 
Inlet Lease Sale 258 at 47-51 (2021).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    But even the agency's updated methodology underestimates the 
climate impacts of fossil-fuel leasing, as the MarketSim model still 
does not account for structural changes in the global economy that are 
likely to reduce long-term oil and gas demand and increase substitution 
to renewables. In fact, the model unreasonably assumes near constant 
demand for oil and gas for 70 years into the future,\22\ which is 
incompatible with domestic and international efforts to mitigate the 
impacts of climate change and would produce unsustainable amounts of 
warming.\23\ As some scholars have noted, domestic and international 
policies are likely to increase renewable generation in future years, 
meaning that fossil-fuel production would substitute for cleaner energy 
use far more than implied by MarketSim's business-as-usual 
assumptions.\24\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \22\ BOEM, Potential Lifecycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions, supra note 
15, at 20.
    \23\ Id. (recognizing that ``[a]s countries, including the U.S., 
address climate change with individual policy targets, this assumption 
could no longer hold,'' and that ``as new energy sources become more 
economically feasible, they could displace existing sources and/or 
alter the composition of energy supply'').
    \24\ See, e.g., Brian C. Prest & James H. Stock, Climate Royalty 
Surcharges 11 (Nat'l Bureau of Econ. Res. Working Paper No. 28564, 
2021) (``[A]s renewable generation increases the electricity demand for 
gas could become more elastic.'').
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In short, fossil-fuel extraction on federal lands increases 
greenhouse gas emissions. Although past Interior analyses have 
minimized this effect or rejected it altogether, its analyses were 
based on incomplete or outdated assumptions. Interior's prior 
analyses--and, more broadly, the notion that domestic production is 
good for the environment--should not form the basis for federal leasing 
policy any longer.
B. Emission Increases from Federal Fossil-Fuel Development Result in 
        Extensive and Irreversible Climate Damage

    Even when Interior has acknowledged that the federal fossil-fuel 
program contributes to climate change, it has typically characterized 
those contributions as insignificant by noting that federal leasing 
represents a relatively small fraction of all national or global 
emissions. But the implication of such an argument is that nobody 
should take steps to mitigate the climate crisis, which as a federal 
court explained, would be a ``prescription for climate disaster.'' \25\ 
In reality, the climate pollution produced by the federal fossil-fuel 
program exacerbates the climate crisis, harms present and future 
generations of Americans, and cannot be ignored.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \25\ California v. Bernhardt, 472 F. Supp. 3d 573, 623 (N.D. Cal. 
2020) (``[F]raming sources as less than 1% of global emissions is 
dishonest and a prescription for climate disaster.'').
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The practice of comparing emissions from a particular planning or 
leasing determination to far larger totals such as global emissions 
misleadingly makes massive amounts of climate harm from federal actions 
appear trivial. As one federal court recently recognized, ``[t]he 
global nature of climate change and greenhouse-gas emissions means that 
any single . . . project likely will make up a negligible percent of . 
. . nation-wide greenhouse gas emissions.'' \26\ Yet while agencies 
assessing percentage comparisons of greenhouse gas emissions should 
recognize this phenomenon and adjust their standards accordingly, they 
typically do not. In other words, agencies all too often fail to 
recognize, as one federal court explained, that even a seemingly ``very 
small portion of a gargantuan source of . . . pollution'' may 
``constitute[] a gargantuan source of . . . pollution on its own 
terms.'' \27\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \26\ WildEarth Guardians v. Bureau of Land Mgmt., 457 F. Supp. 3d 
880, 894 (D. Mont. 2020).
    \27\ Sw. Elec. Power Co. v. EPA, 920 F.3d 999, 1032 (5th Cir. 2019) 
(internal quotation marks omitted).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In one recent assessment, for instance, Interior's Office of 
Surface Mining deemed a proposal's carbon dioxide emissions ``small'' 
because they comprised 0.44% of the annual global total.\28\ But 0.44% 
of annual global emissions is actually a massive volume for an 
individual agency action. If Interior had used the social cost of 
greenhouse gases, which provides a monetary estimate of the harm caused 
by an incremental unit of climate pollution, it would have concluded 
that this determination resulted in at least $9 billion in annual 
climate harm.\29\ As this illustration demonstrates, Interior should 
contextualize the impacts of federal fossil-fuel determinations using 
the social cost of greenhouse gases, rather than dismissing them 
through misleading percentage comparisons to larger denominators.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \28\ Bull Mountains Mine No. 1 Federal Mining Plan Modification 
Environmental Assessment D-2 (2018).
    \29\ Richard L. Revesz & Max Sarinsky, The Social Cost of 
Greenhouse Gases: Legal Economic and Institutional Perspective, 39 Yale 
Journal of Regulation, manuscript at 19 & n.134 (forthcoming 2022) 
(using low-end value of the social cost of greenhouse gases based on a 
3% discount rate).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Indeed, in the few instances in which Interior has used the social 
cost of greenhouse gases, the tool has revealed the substantial climate 
harms of the oil and gas program. In its most recent offshore leasing 
assessment, for instance, BOEM projected that the resulting climate 
pollution (which it underestimated due to poor substitution assumptions 
discussed above) would produce over $2 billion in climate damage.\30\ 
Independent analysis also finds that, even using conservative estimates 
of the social cost of greenhouse gases, curtailing federal leasing 
could cause $10 billion in climate benefit per year.\31\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \30\ BOEM, Revised Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Cook 
Inlet Lease Sale 258 at 51 tbls. 4-14 & 4-15 (2021) (using a 2.5% 
discount rate).
    \31\ Brian Prest, Supply Side Reforms to Oil and Gas Production on 
Federal Lands 32 (RFF Working Paper Working Paper 20-16) (2020).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In short, the federal government should not ignore the substantial 
climate impacts of the oil and gas program. Tools such as the social 
cost of greenhouse gases are available to assess the severity of those 
impacts, and should be widely applied in planning and leasing 
determinations.
C. Particularly Given the Vast Stock of Existing Leases, There Is 
        Considerable Option Value in Restricting Additional Leasing at 
        This Time

    Prior planning and leasing determinations have also been based on a 
lease-now approach, and have mostly ignored the possibility that the 
government could curtail leasing and wait until further information is 
available before determining whether additional leasing is appropriate. 
But this value of delay--known in economics as ``option value''--is 
extremely high, particularly given the fact that fossil-fuel developers 
already have vast stocks of existing leases and thus any potential 
economic benefits from additional leasing will not materialize for 
years.
    Fossil-fuel developers already have vast reserves of both producing 
and currently non-producing leases. In the Outer Continental Shelf 
alone, producers currently hold nearly 3 million acres of producing 
leases and another 8 million acres in non-producing leases.\32\ 
Onshore, producers now hold over 26 million acres of federal land, half 
of which is not yet producing.\33\ This high volume of non-producing 
leases is due in large part to the ``long lag time between leasing a 
parcel and beginning production from that parcel,'' \34\ as the very 
presence of subsurface reserves on a company's balance sheet can 
``boost its attractiveness to shareholders and investors, and even 
increase its ability to borrow on favorable terms.'' \35\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \32\ BOEM, Combined Leasing Report as of Dec. 1, 2021, https://
www.boem.gov/sites/default/files/documents/regions/pacific-ocs-region/
oil-gas/Lease%20stats%2012-1-21.pdf.
    \33\ Compare Oil and Gas Statistics, Bureau of Land Mgmt. tbl. 2, 
https://www.blm.gov/programs-energy-and-minerals-oil-and-gas-oil-and-
gas-statistics, with id. tbl. 6.
    \34\ Congressional Budget Office, Options for Increasing Federal 
Income From Crude Oil and Natural Gas on Federal Lands 3 (2016).
    \35\ Ctr. for Am. Progress, Oil and Gas Companies Gain by 
Stockpiling America's Federal Land 3 (2018); see also Taxpayers for 
Common Sense, Gaming the System: How Federal Land Management in Nevada 
Fails Taxpayers 4 (2019) (``Certain companies and interests take 
advantage of the low acquisition and ownership costs for federal leases 
to amass sizable lease holdings.'').
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Given the vast reserves held by fossil-fuel developers, the current 
need for additional leasing is low and value of delaying leasing 
determinations until further information is available--including 
information about the growth of renewable energy--is high. This 
informational value of delay is known as ``option value,'' and it has 
long been considered by agencies, courts, and economists to be a 
relevant factor for leasing and mineral decisions.\36\ As the U.S. 
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has explained, 
there is a ``tangible present economic benefit to delaying the decision 
to drill for fossil fuels to preserve the opportunity to see what new 
technologies develop and what new information comes to light.'' \37\ 
And this option value ``can be quite substantial'' \38\--as it is now 
when both renewable energy is becoming more widespread and developers 
are likely to wait years to develop new leases.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \36\ BOEM itself has acknowledged the importance of option value in 
assessing leasing, yet has only considered oil price uncertainty 
without rigorously assessing uncertainties regarding environmental 
factors, technological development, and the growth of renewable energy. 
BOEM, 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Proposed 
Final Program 10-3 to 10-16 (2016).
    \37\ Ctr. for Sustainable Econ. v. Jewell, 779 F.3d 588, 610 (D.C. 
Cir. 2015).
    \38\ Michael Livermore, Patience is an Economic Virtue: Real 
Options, Natural Resources, and Offshore Oil, 84 U. Colo. L. Rev. 581, 
638-39 (2013).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In short, leasing additional lands to fossil-fuel developers at the 
present moment offers limited benefit given the vast reserve of 
existing leases, and the value of delaying leasing is high given that 
leasing is likely to result in substantial climate costs down the road. 
Interior should directly account for this option value in its policies 
and practices.
III. Rational Analysis Counsels for Reforming the Oil and Gas Program

    As outlined in this testimony, the federal government has relied on 
irrational and discredited theories for too long in setting oil and gas 
policy. It is past time for the government to rely on the best 
available science and economics. Such evidence, if properly assessed, 
counsels for several key reforms to the oil and gas program.
    First, if the government properly considered energy substitution, 
the social cost of greenhouse gases, and option value, fossil-fuel 
leasing would look less attractive and determinations that Interior 
currently justifies under its flawed methodologies would become 
unjustifiable. Second, if the government properly considered the 
climate harms of the fossil-fuel program, it would eliminate subsidies 
to the oil and gas industry by adjusting fiscal terms.
A. Proper Analysis Counsels for Curtailing Fossil-Fuel Leasing that Is 
        Socially Undesirable

    The substantial climate costs of federal production and the high 
option value of delay strongly indicate that Interior's leasing 
practices are unjustifiable and that the federal government should 
curtail fossil-fuel leasing.
    Given the high option value of delay, Interior's lease-now approach 
is not socially desirable. Analyses from both government agencies and 
independent economists finds that even more ambitious reforms to the 
oil and gas program would have negligible impacts in the short 
term.\39\ For instance, an analysis from Resources for the Future finds 
that a leasing moratorium would not produce any reduction in domestic 
oil production for five years or in domestic gas production for nine 
years, and that declines would then proceed gradually.\40\ Reductions 
in domestic oil and gas production would take decades to fully 
materialize, as recent leasing is likely to result in extraction 
decades into the future.\41\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \39\ See Laura Zachary, The Estimated Effects of a Leasing Pause: A 
Review of the Modeling Consensus and Why a 2020 Study by Timothy J. 
Considine Fails to Compute 2-4 (2021) (reviewing literature including 
studies from the Energy Information Administration and the Federal 
Reserve Bank of Dallas).
    \40\ Id. at 3.
    \41\ In its most recent environmental analysis, BOEM assumed a 40-
year exploration and development scenario. See BOEM, Revised Draft 
Environmental Impact Statement for Cook Inlet Lease Sale 258 (2021).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Given this backdrop, there is little economic benefit to engaging 
in additional fossil-fuel leasing at the present moment, since leasing 
now will have negligible short- to medium-term effects and is not 
needed in large volumes to ``meet national energy needs.'' \42\ Leasing 
now does, however, have severe long-term climate costs, as detailed 
above, since when production does eventually occur it will release 
substantial climate pollution. Thus, there is a high value in delaying 
further leasing. If, after fossil-fuel developers have mostly exhausted 
their reserves, there remains a need for additional energy, then 
Interior could engage in leasing at that time. But if other energy 
sources--including renewable sources--meet national demand and there is 
little need for additional fossil-fuel leasing, then leasing that 
occurs now would have unnecessarily exacerbated the climate crisis for 
limited benefit.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \42\ 43 U.S.C. Sec. 1344(a).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Accordingly, option value strongly suggests the federal government 
should curtail fossil-fuel leasing at this time. With respect to the 
offshore program, this means that BOEM's upcoming five-year plan should 
prioritize renewable-energy generation and conservation. Due to the 
vast reserves of existing leases, this will result in a gradual, long-
term reduction in climate pollution from the federal program while 
ensuring that America has plentiful energy supplies and allowing time 
to for production of clean, renewable fuels to increase.
B. Economic Theory Counsels for Adjusting Lease Terms to Shift 
        Associated Climate Costs onto Fossil-Fuel Producers

    As discussed above, the social cost of greenhouse gases provides a 
highly useful tool for assessing the climate impacts of the federal oil 
and gas program. In particular, the tool can be highly useful for 
adjusting lease terms to ensure that fossil-fuel producers bear the 
costs of the climate pollution that they cause. Doing so would correct 
a market failure and align federal leasing policy with basic economic 
theory.
    In economics, the costs of climate change are known as a negative 
externality, which is a market failure that results when a cost caused 
by a producer is not financially borne by that producer. Negative 
externalities are market failures because producers, lacking financial 
incentive to do so, do not consider the costs that they impose on third 
parties--here, the entire public. As a result, the public provides an 
implicit subsidy to the producer because it bears the costs that the 
producer imposes. According to a recent study from the International 
Monetary Fund, in fact, the United States provided the fossil-fuel 
industry with $660 billion in subsidies in 2020, mostly through 
implicit subsidies.\43\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \43\ Ian Perry et al., Still Not Getting Energy Prices Right: A 
Global and Country Update of Fossil Fuel Subsidies 26 (Int'l Monetary 
Fund Working Paper No. 2021/236, 2021).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The market failure of negative externalities can be corrected by 
``internalizing'' the externality--that is, by shifting the external 
cost from third parties onto the producer. For Interior, this means 
adjusting lease terms to make the producer pay the social cost of 
greenhouse gases caused by production on federal lands. The agency has 
broad authority to adjust lease terms: for instance, resource-
management statutes set floors for royalty rates but give the agency 
wide latitude to set rates above those minimums.\44\ As one member of 
Congress explained before the statute's enactment, the MLA gives 
Interior ``practically unlimited authority as to the granting and the 
terms and conditions of leases.'' \45\ Given the broad concern for 
climate impacts in land-management statutes, discussed above, Interior 
undoubtedly has authority to adjust lease terms to internalize 
environmental impacts.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \44\ See 43 U.S.C. Sec. 1337(a)(1) (setting minimum royalty rate of 
12.5 percent of offshore oil and gas revenues); 30 U.S.C. 
Sec. 226(b)(1)(A) (setting minimum royalty rate of 12.5 percent of 
onshore oil and gas revenues); id. Sec. 207(a) (setting minimum royalty 
rate of 12.5 percent of surface coal revenues).
    \45\ 51 Cong. Rec. H14,954 (Sept. 10, 1914) (statement by Mr. 
Thomson of Illinois).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Adjusting lease terms to eliminate subsidies and shift the cost of 
climate pollution onto producers could raise billions of dollars in 
public revenue while simultaneously reducing climate pollution. One 
recent analysis, in fact, found that incorporating the social cost of 
greenhouse gases into royalty rates for offshore and onshore oil and 
gas would increase royalty revenue by $6 billion annually while 
reducing climate pollution by over 40 million metric tons per year.\46\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \46\ Prest & Stock, supra note 24, at 17 tbl. 3 (assessing impacts 
of a ``welfare-maximizing'' climate surcharge based on a $125 valuation 
of the social cost of greenhouse gases).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion
    For decades, the federal government has inadequately considered the 
climate harms that result from oil and gas leasing on public waters and 
lands. It is time to restore rationality to the oil and gas program. In 
particular, federal policy should be based on credible scientific and 
economic analysis, and as detailed above, such analysis counsels for 
key reforms including curtailing leasing and adjusting fiscal terms.

    I thank the committee for this opportunity and look forward to 
answering any questions.

                                 ______
                                 

 Questions Submitted for the Record to Max Sarinsky, Senior Attorney, 
                     Institute for Policy Integrity
             Questions Submitted by Representative Huffman
    Question 1. Mr. Sarinsky, can you identify a few of the times that 
U.S. courts have taken issue with federal agencies using either perfect 
substitution or very high substitution rates to support fossil fuel 
projects or additional fossil fuel leasing?

    Answer. At least five federal court cases fit this description, 
which can be grouped into two categories.
    In at least two cases, federal appellate courts have rejected the 
assumption of perfect substitution, finding that it violates economic 
principles. First, in 2003, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth 
Circuit rejected an analysis from the Surface Transportation Board 
assuming that a proposed coal railroad would not affect coal 
consumption, explaining that ``the proposition that the demand for coal 
will be unaffected by an increase in availability and a decrease in 
price, which is the stated goal of the project, is illogical at best.'' 
\1\ Then, in 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit 
rejected an analysis from the Bureau of Land Management (``BLM'') 
finding that fossil fuel leasing would not affect greenhouse gas 
emissions, finding the ``perfect substitution assumption arbitrary and 
capricious'' because it is ``contrary to basic supply and demand 
principles.'' \2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ Mid States Coal. for Progress v. Surface Transp. Bd., 345 F.3d 
520, 549 (8th Cir. 2003).
    \2\ WildEarth Guardians v. BLM, 870 F.3d 1222, 1236 (10th Cir. 
2017).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In three other cases, federal courts have rejected the MarketSim 
model that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (``BOEM'') developed 
for its review of offshore leasing, which finds very high substitution 
rates. First, in 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit 
held that BOEM's analysis improperly omitted impacts on foreign oil 
demand resulting from domestic production, and thus irrationally 
assumed that foreign oil consumption will remain static when domestic 
production increases.\3\ As the Court explained, this ignores the 
global nature of the energy market and violates ``basic economics 
principles'' about supply and demand.\4\ Then, in 2021, the U.S. 
District Court for the District of Alaska echoed these findings in a 
decision vacating a BLM development plan that relied on the same faulty 
modeling.\5\ Most recently, just last week, the U.S. District Court for 
the District of Columbia identified the same flaw in BOEM's analysis 
and thus vacated an offshore lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico.\6\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \3\ Id.
    \4\ Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. Bernhardt, 982 F.3d 723, 736-
40 (9th Cir. 2020).
    \5\ Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic v. BLM, No. 3:20-CV-
00290-SLG, 2021 WL 3667986, at *10-14 (D. Alaska Aug. 18, 2021).
    \6\ Friends of the Earth v. Haaland, No. CV 21-2317 (RC), 2022 WL 
254526, at *12-15 (D.D.C. Jan. 27, 2022).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
               Questions Submitted by Representative Carl
    Question 1. You emphasize twice in your testimony's first two 
paragraphs that your think-tank (IPI) is non-partisan. Please disclose 
for the record the political contributions and affiliations of yourself 
and obtain from your present colleagues and disclose that information 
for the institute's executive committee and board.

    Answer. The redundancy of that statement in my written testimony 
was due to an editing oversight for which I apologize. In any event, my 
individual contributions to federally registered political committees 
is publicly availablethrough the Federal Election Commission (``FEC'') 
website.\7\ I have no personal knowledge of contributions from other 
Institute for Policy Integrity (``Policy Integrity'') staff or advisory 
board members, though I understand their federal campaign donations 
should also be a matter of public record on the FEC website.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \7\ https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/
?contributor_name=FEC+-
+Campaign+Finance+Reports+and+Data&contributor_name=max+sarinsky.

    Question 2. What is your think-tank's prediction for both U.S. and 
global oil demand over by years 2025, 2035, 2040, and 2050? (If IPI has 
not made or refuses to make such a prediction, please cite a credible 
source for such prediction upon which you base your policy 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
prescriptions.)

    Answer. Policy Integrity has not made projections of future U.S. or 
global oil demand. While many independent projections exist, some of 
the most authoritative projections come from the U.S. Energy 
Information Administration (``EIA'')--a federal agency that analyzes 
and disseminates energy information. In its most recent Annual Energy 
Outlook, EIA recognized substantial uncertainty in future oil demand. 
For instance, under the ``Low Oil and Gas Supply'' case, EIA projects 
that renewable energy would greatly increase its share of U.S. 
electricity generation while natural gas would decline substantially, 
with renewables soon becoming the dominant source of U.S. electricity 
generation.\8\ In some other cases, EIA projects that oil demand will 
remain relatively steady over the coming decades.\9\ Of course, the 
policies that the United States and other nations enact in the coming 
years could greatly determine which future occurs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \8\ U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 
2021 at 15 (2021), https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/
AEO2021_Release_Presentation.pdf.
    \9\ E.g., id.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As explained in my written and oral testimony, this considerable 
long-term uncertainty creates substantial ``option value'' (i.e., the 
economic value of delay) that counsels for curtailing leasing at this 
time, when developers hold so many existing leases in reserve and thus 
the short-term need or economic benefit from additional leasing is 
currently low. If there remains a need for additional energy after 
fossil-fuel developers have mostly exhausted their reserves, then 
Interior could engage in additional leasing at that time. But if other 
energy sources, including renewable sources, meet national demand and 
there is little need for additional fossil-fuel leasing, then leasing 
that occurs now would have unnecessarily exacerbated the climate crisis 
for limited benefit.\10\ In other words, the fact that long-term oil 
and gas demand is highly uncertain is itself a strong reason to curtail 
leasing at this time.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \10\ For a fuller discussion of option value and how it may affect 
Interior leasing determinations, see pages 6-8 of my written testimony 
previously submitted to this committee.

    Question 3. Has any person or agency within the Biden 
Administration ever asked IPI or its employees to conduct studies or 
informal analysis of any kind to support its policy or regulatory 
processes? If so, please provide the committee either physical or 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
electronic copies of such communications.

    Answer. No person or agency within the Biden Administration has 
asked me to conduct studies or analysis to support its policy or 
regulatory processes, either on the subject matter of my testimony or 
on anything else. I am not aware of any person or agency within the 
Biden Administration asking other Policy Integrity staff to conduct 
studies or analysis to support the Administration's policy or 
regulatory processes.

    Question 4. If so, has IPI or its employees been in any way 
compensated for such work product? If so, please provide the committee 
either physical or electronic copies of such transactions.

    Answer. Please see response to Question 3.

    Question 5. Excluding public comments, has IPI directly 
communicated with any member of the White House staff, either political 
appointee or career staff, on BOEM's Revised Draft Environmental Impact 
Statement for Cook Inlet Lease Sale 258? If so, please provide the 
committee either physical or electronic copies of such transactions.

    Answer. I have not directly communicated with any member of the 
White House staff on BOEM's Revised Draft Environmental Impact 
Statement for Cook Inlet Lease Sale 258 (excluding public comments). I 
am not aware of any other Policy Integrity staff having done so.

    Question 6. Excluding public comments, has IPI directly 
communicated with any member of the Interior Department staff, either 
political appointee or career staff, on BOEM's Revised Draft 
Environmental Impact Statement for Cook Inlet Lease Sale 258? If so, 
please provide the committee either physical or electronic copies of 
such transactions.

    Answer. I have not directly communicated with any member of the 
Interior Department staff on BOEM's Revised Draft Environmental Impact 
Statement for Cook Inlet Lease Sale 258 (excluding public comments). I 
am not aware of any other Policy Integrity staff having done so.

    Question 7. Please disclose any instances where IPI has offered, 
been requested for, or provided any information in support of the 
filings of the parties to Friends of the Earth v. Haaland (DDC) as well 
as any and all of the cases you cite in your testimony, and please 
provide the committee either physical or electronic copies of such 
communications (Including Ctr. for Biological Diversity v. Bernhardt, 
982 F.3d 723, 736-40 (9th Cir. 2020)).

    Answer. Policy Integrity served as co-counsel for petitioner in 
Center for Sustainable Economy v. Jewell, 779 F.3d 588 (D.C. Cir. 
2015), which was cited in my written testimony. Policy Integrity 
submitted an amicus curiae brief supporting petitioners-appellants in 
WildEarth Guardians v. BLM, 870 F.3d 1222 (10th Cir. 2017), which was 
cited in my written testimony. Policy Integrity also submitted an 
amicus curiae brief supporting plaintiffs in California v. Bernhardt, 
472 F. Supp. 3d 573 (N.D. Cal. 2020), which was cited in my written 
testimony. All three filings predated my employment with Policy 
Integrity.
    I contemplated filing an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Policy 
Integrity in support of plaintiffs in Sovereign Inupiat for a Living 
Arctic v. BLM, No. 3:20-CV-00290-SLG, 2021 WL 3667986 (D. Alaska Aug. 
18, 2021), which was also cited in my written testimony, but decided 
against it. I have otherwise not offered, been requested for, or 
provided any information in support of the filings in any of the cases 
cited in my written testimony. I am not aware of other Policy Integrity 
staff offering, being requested for, or providing any information in 
support of the filings in any of the cases cited in my written 
testimony, aside from the three cases discussed in the prior paragraph 
in which Policy Integrity itself prepared and submitted written 
filings.

    Question 8. Your testimony cites a working paper from one Brian 
Prest of Resources for the Future. Please disclose all communications 
between IPI employees and Mr. Prest.

    Answer. In March 2021, after the publication of his cited working 
papers, a colleague and I exchanged emails with Dr. Prest regarding his 
research. I am aware that several of my colleagues have also 
communicated with Dr. Prest since the publication of his cited working 
papers, but have not been privy to those communications.

    Question 9. In the hearing, you indicated that you were aware of a 
study that showed restricting oil and gas production in the Gulf of 
Mexico would result in a decrease in the total consumption of oil and 
gas in the U.S. Please provide that study.

    Answer. At the committee hearing, I responded affirmatively to Rep. 
Carl's question as to whether any studies show that ``restricting oil 
and gas production in federal waters will actually result in decreasing 
the total consumption of oil in the U.S.'' The study that I referenced 
is presented on pages 43-48 of BOEM's Revised Draft Environmental 
Impact Statement for Cook Inlet Lease Sale 258.\11\ As that study 
found, increasing domestic oil and gas production in Alaska's Cook 
Inlet would result in an increase in both domestic and international 
oil and gas consumption, thereby resulting in over $2 billion in 
additional climate damage.\12\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \11\ This analysis is available at https://www.boem.gov/sites/
default/files/documents/oil-gas-energy/leasing/LS258-DEIS_0.pdf.
    \12\ Id. at 51 tbls. 4-14 & 4-15 (using 2.5% discount rate).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    While I did not say this during the Committee hearing, BOEM has 
actually recognized for years--long before its 2021 analysis discussed 
above, and beyond the specific context of the Cook Inlet--that 
increasing offshore oil and gas production increases total U.S. fossil-
fuel consumption. In its 2016 analysis for its current five-year 
program, BOEM concluded that leasing and extraction under the program 
would in part displace reduced consumption, meaning that the five-year 
program would increase fossil-fuel consumption.\13\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \13\ BOEM, OCS Oil and Natural Gas: Potential Lifecycle Greenhouse 
Gas Emissions and Social Cost of Carbon 18 tbl. 6-3 (2016), https://
www.boem.gov/sites/default/files/oil-and-gas-energy-program/Leasing/
Five-Year-Program/2017-2022/OCS-Report-BOEM-2016-065---OCS-Oil-and-
Natural-Gas---Potential-Lifecycle-GHG-Emissions-and-Social-Cost-of-
Carbon.pdf.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                 ______
                                 

    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Mr. Sarinsky. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Pugliaresi for 5 minutes.
    Welcome to the Committee, Mr. Pugliaresi.
    [Pause.]
    Dr. Lowenthal. Mr. Pugliaresi, I believe you are muted. 
Please unmute yourself.
    Mr. Pugliaresi. My apologies for that.

STATEMENT OF LUCIAN (LOU) PUGLIARESI, PRESIDENT, ENERGY POLICY 
       RESEARCH FOUNDATION, INC. (EPRINC), WASHINGTON, DC

    Mr. Pugliaresi. Chairman Lowenthal, Ranking Member Stauber, 
members of the Subcommittee, my name is Lucian Pugliaresi. I am 
President of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, and I 
welcome this opportunity to provide my perspective on the 
importance of the Federal Government's oil and gas leasing 
program in the Gulf of Mexico.
    First slide, please.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Next slide.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Great. The United States is the world's 
largest oil and gas producer, and the Gulf of Mexico is an 
important contributor to this leadership position, providing 
between 15 and 18 percent of total U.S. crude production in 
recent years.
    Next slide, please.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. The Gulf of Mexico yields substantial 
revenues to the U.S. Treasury, contributes to American energy 
security, and is a prolific and low-cost resource for 
sustaining the North American oil and gas production platform. 
If we were to discontinue production from this natural 
resource, the Federal Government would lose an important source 
of income, revenues the Federal Government collects from the 
Gulf of Mexico oil and gas production would now be collected by 
foreign producers. A portion of this revenue stream now 
provides significant funding for coastal restoration projects 
on the Gulf Coast.
    Next slide.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. As shown in Figure 3, halting Gulf of 
Mexico production is likely to be counter-productive in 
addressing carbon emissions. Production from Gulf of Mexico 
petroleum resources, particularly the new prospects in the 
deep-water gulf, have considerably lower emissions per barrel 
than most other locations.
    Next slide, please.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. I think one of the things we need to keep 
in mind is that, at least over the last 10 years, natural gas, 
often produced in large quantities as a byproduct of crude oil 
production, has been the most important fuel in reducing U.S. 
carbon emissions, as it is a cost-effective substitute for the 
use of coal in the production of electricity. This explains the 
remarkable performance of the United States in lowering carbon 
emissions. Our trading partners can take advantage of this as 
well, as U.S. gas can be exported as LNG.
    Next slide, please.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. This is very important to understand this 
slide. As you can see from previous past attempts to accelerate 
our use of wind and solar, it is an effort that faces enormous 
obstacles. Fully implementing an energy transition over the 
next 30 years is neither easy, nor can it be assured. We face 
important obstacles and failure modes, so abandoning our legacy 
fuels before alternative sources are ready is risky.
    Next slide.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Achieving net-zero in the developed world 
will reduce carbon emissions by only a small amount. The 
developed world is rich. We can afford a lot of costly 
measures. But even if we were to exceed in getting net-zero 
throughout the entire OECD, global emissions in 2050 are not 
likely to be any more than 20 percent less than in a business-
as-usual case. And the reason for this is that, in the 
developing world, dense, ample supplies of energy are going to 
be driven by population and economic growth.
    Next slide.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. The United States should see the current 
energy crisis in Europe as a cautionary tale and learn from it. 
If you look at the major utility systems in the countries that 
have accelerated its use of intermittent fuels without having 
adequate backup or sustainable power sources, these are the 
countries and the systems which are experiencing the largest 
price increases and the most unstable power supplies.
    Next slide.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. The energy transition is going to establish 
a lot of environmental challenges and energy security issues, 
in addition to the old ones. As you can see from this slide, 
the United States is the largest oil and gas producer in the 
world. So, the existing policy to try to reduce U.S. oil and 
gas production and accelerate the transition will move us from 
a position of energy independence to highly dependent on 
critical materials and minerals. And we do not yet have an 
adequate plan to develop those minerals in the United States.
    Finally, next slide.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Policy measures should be robust against 
uncertainty, and this is really quite a serious problem, in my 
view. The future is quite uncertain, and even well-known 
modelers and experts have widely different views on the future 
of our energy requirements. And whatever strategies we 
undertake, they need to withstand against these uncertainties 
as we move ahead.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Pugliaresi follows:]
   Prepared Statement of Lucian Pugliaresi, President, Energy Policy 
                   Research Foundation, Inc. (EPRINC)
    Chairman Lowenthal, Ranking Member Stauber, and members of the 
subcommittee, my name is Lucian Pugliaresi. I am President of the 
Energy Policy Research Foundation, Inc. (EPRINC), a non-profit public 
policy research organization. EPRINC was founded in 1944 and studies 
energy economics and policy issues with special emphasis on oil, 
natural gas, and petroleum product markets. I have worked on a broad 
range of energy security issues for my entire career, both in and out 
of government, beginning with the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo. Over the 
last two years EPRINC has undertaken a systematic assessment of the 
limitations of computational models that evaluate our energy future.
    I welcome this opportunity to provide my perspective on the 
importance of the Federal Government's oil and gas leasing program in 
the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The U.S. is the world's largest oil and gas 
producer and the GOM is an important contributor to this leadership 
position by providing between 15-18% of total U.S. crude oil production 
(Figure 1) in recent years. The Gulf of Mexico yields substantial 
revenues to the U.S. Treasury, contributes to American energy security, 
and is a prolific and low-cost resource for sustaining the North 
American oil and gas production platform.


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

    If we were to discontinue production from this national 
resource, the Federal Government would lose an important source of 
income and see rising unemployment in the petroleum and related 
industries. American vulnerability to expensive and insecure petroleum 
imports would rise. Revenues the Federal Government collects from GOM 
oil and gas production (Figure 2) would now be collected by foreign 
producers as U.S. imports rise to replace the lost production. 
Important environmental programs would also suffer. Under the 2006 Gulf 
of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA), Gulf producing states receive 
37.5% of all qualifying OCS revenues, with 20% of each state's share 
dedicated to ``coastal political subdivisions.'' This revenue stream 
provides significant funding for coastal restoration projects on the 
Gulf Coast.

[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

    As shown in Figure 3, halting GOM production is also likely to 
be counterproductive in addressing carbon emissions. Production from 
GOM petroleum resources produces lower levels of emissions per barrel 
than most other locations.\1\ Nevertheless, President Biden has issued 
several Executive Orders aimed at achieving a ``net-zero'' carbon 
emissions target for the national economy, in part, by halting new 
offshore oil and gas development.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ These findings were published and supported during the Obama 
Administration. See U.S. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Ocean 
Energy Management, ``OCS Oil and Natural Gas: Potential Lifecycle 
Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Social Cost of Carbon,'' November 2016, 
https://www.boem.gov/sites/default/files/oil-and-gas-energy-program/
Leasing/Five-Year-Program/2017-2022/OCS-Report-BOEM-2016-065---OCS-Oil-
and-Natural-Gas---Potential-Lifecycle-GHG-Emissions-and-Social-Cost-of-
Carbon.pdf.


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


    More importantly, initiatives to halt or curtail domestic oil 
and gas production present grave economic and social risks to the 
United States and represent a misplaced understanding of the difficulty 
in executing an energy transition over the next 20-30 years. Natural 
gas, often produced in large quantities as a by-product of crude oil 
production, has been the most important fuel in reducing U.S. carbon 
emissions as it is a cost-effective substitute for the use of coal in 
the production of electricity (Figure 4). Before proceeding with any 
policies to limit the use of legacy fossil fuels, we need to understand 
the full range of uncertainties and the potential implications to our 
security and economic well-being. Public support for the transition 
will hinge on the availability of reliable and affordable energy which 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
remains the lifeblood of our economy and our national security.


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


    The energy transition requires overcoming complex technical, 
scientific and public policy challenges. It is an enormous undertaking, 
fraught with setbacks, especially if attempted quickly without a 
careful assessment of the full range of economic and social 
consequences. I encourage the Congress to consider the following points 
as you proceed with legislation to halt or limit production of oil and 
gas from the Gulf of Mexico.

1. The Energy System is highly complicated, inter-connected regionally 
and globally in ways that are not always apparent. The energy 
transition presents a new set of supply and price risks for consumers 
and manufacturers. Fully implementing an energy transition over the 
next 30 years is neither easy nor can it be assured.

    The tasks required in any transition will be enormous, difficult 
and expensive--complicated by the fact that other countries around the 
world are attempting similar feats with little or no practical 
experience. Worldwide, fossil fuels continue to dominate the energy 
complex, providing over 80 percent of primary energy requirements 
(Figure 5). This will not be our first attempt to accelerate the energy 
transition and Figure 6 demonstrates how difficult it remains to 
implement ambitious plans to accelerate the deployment of wind and 
solar resources to support the energy transition. The deployment of 
these technologies has been limited even as the U.S. government has 
provided direct financial incentives and mandates to advance wind and 
solar power over the last 30 years (over $50 billion in Federal 
expenditures in tax incentives and grants between 2005-2015 alone).\2\ 
Today, these two technologies produce less than 4% of our primary 
energy requirements. In the same time period (2005-2015), gross 
receipts to the Federal Government from oil and gas leasing exceeded 
$110 billion.\3\ Oil and gas continues to garner revenues for the 
Federal Government, and as stated above, a considerable portion is 
shared with the states. The differences in these two revenue streams 
(one from, and other to, the Federal Government) reflect the reality of 
the marketplace.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ Examination of Federal Financial Assistance in the Renewable 
Energy Market, November 2018. https://www.energy.gov/ne/downloads/
report-examination-federal-financial-assistance-renewable-energy-
market.
    \3\ Options for Increasing Federal Income from Crude Oil and 
Natural Gas on Federal Lands. Congressional Budget Office, April 2016. 
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/
reports/51421-oil_and_gas_options-OneCol-3.pdf.


[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


2. Achieving net zero in the developed world will reduce carbon 
emissions by only a small amount, likely no more than 20 percent of 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
expected global emissions.

    Reducing carbon emissions is a global challenge. Even if the 
developed world achieves net zero, our research concludes that without 
a massive commitment from the developing world, the net reduction in 
carbon emissions will be relatively small, perhaps no more than 20% 
less in 2050 when compared to a business-as-usual scenario (Figure 7). 
An important challenge for the developed world, represented by 
membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 
(OECD), is that policies that push for a rapid energy transition will 
also likely be accompanied by lower rates of economic growth. This is a 
serious challenge for the OECD as any loss of economic expansion will 
also reduce public resources for research and development of new and 
advanced carbon free energy resources.


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


3. Regulatory programs as well as private sector commitments to 
accelerate the energy transition--whether it be mandates, targets, 
financial and procurement guidelines create uncertainty and financial 
risks that limit investment commitments to current legacy fuels, many 
of which are likely to remain in demand for years to come.

    Legislative, regulatory and policy decisions made today, even if 
relatively narrow in scope are creating expectations of rising costs 
and delays in extraction of oil and gas resources, and increasing the 
risk for capital flows to establish new oil and gas production. For 
example, policies by financial institutions that prohibit investments 
in the development of oil and gas resources may lead to temporary if 
not longer-term supply constraints that will affect energy prices, 
manufacturing and U.S. competitiveness.
    Many commentators assert that there remains a serious risk that oil 
and gas companies are likely to end up owning assets for which there is 
no market, but financial data does not support the claim that companies 
are holding ``stranded assets'' (Figure 8), nor is it likely that world 
demand for oil and gas will decline precipitously in the near future. 
Our desire for change cannot obscure the on-the-ground reality of how 
important energy is to our economy and the need to assure a robust 
supply of reliable and affordable energy.


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


4. A portion of the recent escalation in energy prices can be tied 
directly to dislocations in energy supplies (largely oil and gas) from 
the Covid-19 pandemic. However, government policies, such as the halt 
on leasing on federal lands, the cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline, 
the potential cancellation of line 5 from Canada, rising regulatory 
requirements and permitting delays are all threatening North American 
oil and gas production. We undermine this strategic asset at our peril 
if we abandon these fuels before the energy transition is well 
established.

    The U.S. and the rest of the world will continue to need oil and 
gas throughout the transition. Any policy decision based on the simple 
premise that the U.S. can transition simply by cutting off production 
of legacy fuels will backfire horribly and erode public support. Other 
measures undertaken or under consideration, such as halting crude oil 
exports or a release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve without a 
genuine supply disruption are likely to be counterproductive.
    Recent speculation that some Members of Congress and the Biden 
Administration are considering reinstituting a ban on U.S. crude oil 
exports is especially worrisome as it would likely raise gasoline 
prices and further disrupt supply chains. The U.S. is a large 
continental land mass and so minimizing transportation and processing 
costs for moving crude oil to market are important. Oil prices are set 
in the world market so a refiner in Hawaii would rather purchase crude 
from Indonesia than Houston and save on transportation costs. A Gulf 
coast refiner whose processing technology is tuned to heavy crude can 
gain cost efficiencies by using Mexican or Canadian oil rather than one 
with alternative specifications produced in North Dakota. Halting the 
export of crudes with specifications suited for foreign refiners would 
likely reduce U.S. production and further drive-up crude oil prices and 
lead to further increases in gasoline prices.
    Crude oil and petroleum product exports allow the entire North 
American production platform to minimize transportation and processing 
costs. Open access to markets and crude and product transportation 
efficiencies permit U.S. refineries to operate at high levels of 
capacity utilization and provides opportunities for upstream producers 
to maximize crude oil output. The free movement of capital, crude oil 
and petroleum products remain critical to sustaining the productive 
capacity of the U.S. petroleum industry and the entire North American 
oil and natural gas production platform. These efficiencies have led to 
rapid expansion of U.S. oil production and remain one of the central 
reasons that large volumes of U.S. crude imports also result in large 
volumes of higher value-added exports of petroleum products. One of the 
reasons the U.S. has achieved energy independence is that the 
production platform is efficient. Reinstituting the export ban would 
result in further reductions in U.S. production, higher stress on 
supply chains, and rising price risk to gasoline supplies.

5. Policy Matters. The U.S. should see the current energy crisis in 
Europe as a cautionary tale and learn from it.

    The current energy crisis in Europe, characterized by rapidly 
escalating natural gas prices, has been driven by constraints in 
electricity supplies. The European crisis has its roots in policies 
that sought rapid decarbonization without accounting for the associated 
supply risks. Germany presents a stark example as the rising demand for 
natural gas to support intermittent renewable supplies has contributed 
to a more expensive and a less resilient power sector (Figures 9 and 
10). Clearly, recovery from the pandemic is a factor, but so are 
policies that limit fuel diversity and make power systems less 
resilient.


[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


    The German Commission on Growth, Structural Change and 
Employment, better known and referred at the Coal Commission set up by 
the German Government to enquire into the future of the role of coal 
(and lignite) in the country's low carbon energy transition released 
its strategy document in January 2019. The German transition strategy 
followed two previous policy instruments, the German Feed-In Tariff Law 
of 2000 and the German Nuclear Plant Shut down Directive of 2012. In 
early 2020, German government articulated its first draft of its 
Hydrogen Strategy that made a technology choice of hydrogen production 
through the electrolysis route over other more economically attractive 
technology options.
    The German energy transition plan is now directed by these new 
policy instruments and despite support for the transition initiative by 
several leading figures (including the Head of the IEA, Dr Fatih Birol) 
these policy initiatives are delivering higher systemic risk into the 
German power sector.

    Two risky features are now prevalent in the German power sector:

  1.  The transition to a low carbon economy in Germany--driven mainly 
            by policy instruments around highly attractive feed-in 
            tariffs for renewables, a shut-down of coal and nuclear 
            plants by 2024 and 2038 respectively and the introduction 
            of hydrogen by a specifically chosen technology route. 
            These policy initiatives will not be sufficient to meet 
            demand for electricity in Germany in 2030. The energy 
            transition in Germany has been a policy driven exercise 
            that has been expensive and yet unable to achieve its 
            stated aims.

  2.  The only remaining fuel vector for Germany to close the gap in 
            its electricity demand then remains natural gas/LNG.

    These policy instruments, directed at rapidly bringing down carbon 
emissions will continue to be expensive, unable to meet its stated 
decarbonization targets and drive rising, instead of reduced, demand 
for natural gas.

6. Policy initiatives that seek to accelerate the U.S. to a fully 
renewable energy complex will have global implications for energy 
security.

    Much of the world will remain dependent on oil and gas with a 
growing dependence on producers from the Middle East and Russia. Recent 
trends in upstream oil and gas capital expenditures are especially 
worrisome (Figure 11). While the reluctance to increase capital 
expenditures among the major oil companies may be tied to concerns on 
strengthening their balance sheets, rising development costs, other 
forces may be at play as well including government directives 
discouraging investment by financial institutions in upstream oil and 
gas development. Should this trend continue, we might find ourselves in 
the midst of a two-speed transition process. Rapid transition (at least 
an attempted rapid transition) in the OECD, but limited progress in the 
developing world. China, Russia and the Middle East will gain 
positional advantage leaving the U.S. and its allies vulnerable to 
strategic threats. We may end up with an energy transition which will 
see the U.S. move from our current position of energy independence to 
dependence on a broad set of critical minerals from insecure sources, 
while at the same time experiencing growing reliance on traditional oil 
and gas supplies from insecure and expensive sources.


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


7. The transition will establish new environmental challenges and 
energy security issues in addition to the old.

    Figures 12, 13, and 14 show the challenges facing the U.S. Today, 
the U.S. is the largest producer of oil and gas worldwide. This 
provides strategic advantages and energy independence. A rapid shift to 
reliance on electric vehicles (and batteries), solar, wind and related 
renewable energy sources will also require large quantities of copper, 
lithium, manganese, cobalt, and molybdenum. While many of these 
minerals can be developed through potential mining sites in the U.S., 
these minerals will also require new processing facilities to be 
developed into useable materials. Permitting constraints and 
environmental reviews will likely make the development of these 
resources a long and arduous effort.


[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


    In addition, it is not a trivial effort to construct large 
scale wind and solar farms and to accelerate the production of electric 
vehicles. Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has 
outlined the formidable requirements for replacing the energy output 
from a single 100-megawatt natural gas-fired turbine with wind 
turbines.

        It would require at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the 
        size of the Washington Monument, occupying some 10 square miles 
        of land. Building those wind machines consumes enormous 
        quantities of conventional materials, including concrete, 
        steel, and fiberglass, along with less common materials, 
        including `rare earth' elements such as dysprosium . . .. All 
        forms of green energy require roughly comparable quantities of 
        materials in order to build machines that capture nature's 
        flows: sun, wind, and water. Wind farms come close to matching 
        hydro dams in material consumption, and solar farms outstrip 
        both. In all three cases, the largest share of the tonnage is 
        found in conventional materials like concrete, steel, and 
        glass. Compared with a natural gas power plant, all three 
        require at least 10 times as many total tons mined, moved, and 
        converted into machines to deliver the same quantity of 
        energy.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \4\ Mills, M.P. (2020, July 9). Green Energy Reality Check: It's 
not as clean as you think. Manhattan Institute. https://www.manhattan-
institute.org/mines-minerals-and-green-energy-reality-check Page 6.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
8. Policy measures should be robust against uncertainty.

    We are heading into a largely uncharted world full of enormous, 
price, energy security risks. We have an extraordinary responsibility 
to consider the vast and array of risks and to develop policies that 
are robust under the uncertainties that cannot be easily predicted. 
Expect failures, cost over-runs and the unexpected. As shown in Figure 
15, experienced analysts with long involvement in modeling our future 
energy requirements disagree on worldwide requirements over the next 30 
years.


[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                                 __
                                 

  Questions Submitted for the Record to Lucian Pugliaresi, President, 
            Energy Policy Research Foundation, Inc. (EPRINC)
             Questions Submitted by Representative Stauber
    Question 1. Why should the Federal Government offer more leases, 
when so many have been issued and development has yet to proceed?

    Answer. The federal outer continental shelf (OCS) leasing program 
provides specific conditions for winning bidders, including bonus bids, 
rental fees and time limits for development of leased properties. In 
order to maximize efficient development and the productive capacity of 
federal offshore petroleum resources it is important to have a large 
inventory of properties available for development. A large inventory of 
leases waiting development is not necessarily an indication the 
Department of Interior has issued too many leases or that the existing 
inventory is excessive. Changes in market conditions, technological 
advances, environmental reviews and mitigation programs, potential for 
unitization of adjoining properties can alter the profitability, 
sometimes substantially, of leased properties and the flow of financial 
capital for development. The pace at which offshore resources are 
developed does not, and should not, be determined by the date on which 
original leases were issued.
    A similar example is recent criticism over the large number of 
export permits for liquified natural gas (LNG) issued by the U.S. 
Department of Energy (DOE). To date a large number of LNG export 
facilities have been authorized, but many of these have not received a 
Final Investment Decision (FID). The large number of undeveloped, but 
authorized export permits has been identified as a primary reason that 
DOE officials have decided to halt issuing any new permits to so-called 
non-free-trade destinations, which represents most of the world's 
natural gas consuming countries. However, such a policy fails to 
recognize that some pending projects might be superior to already 
authorized facilities. For example, proposed construction of new 
liquefaction facilities on Mexico's Pacific Coast, supplied by U.S. 
produced natural gas, could supply U.S. LNG to important allies and 
markets in the Pacific Rim. There are no restrictions on the shipment 
of U.S. natural gas to Mexico, but additional permits are required for 
natural gas shipped to Mexico that is re-exported as LNG. The best 
potential for expanding cost-effective supplies of domestic oil, gas 
and LNG require a large inventory of prospects that can command 
financial support to proceed.
    More importantly, there remains widespread agreement that the U.S., 
the world's current largest producer of natural gas, has substantial 
gas reserves and could provide additional supplies to the world market 
both as an instrument of global energy security and as a cost-effective 
pathway to limit emissions of carbon dioxide as a substitute for coal.

    Question 2. During the hearing, there was discussion of subsidies 
from the U.S. Government from oil and gas production, citing an IMF 
paper. Could you please clarify the assumptions and conclusions of this 
working paper?

    Answer. There was discussion during the hearing that development of 
oil and gas resources from the Outer Continental Shelf did not 
accurately account for the large subsidies provided by the government 
as described in a recent IMF working paper.\1\ The Committee was left 
with the impression that oil and gas development received an annual 
subsidy in excess of $600 billion. Two features of the working paper 
are worth noting, First, the IMF uses the word ``subsidies'' to include 
not just direct tax payer support for fuel use, but an estimate of 
environmental costs for the combustion of the fuel. Nearly half of 
their ``subsidy'' calculations are related to coal use and are 
therefore not relevant to development of oil and gas resources on the 
OCS. In fact, to the extent that offshore development provides 
additional volumes of natural gas that can substitute for coal 
combustion, it would substantially lower the IMF estimates of the 
effective ``subsidy.'' In addition, the report makes no adjustment for 
revenues collected by federal, state, and local jurisdictions from oil 
and gas development of public and private lands. Note that, according 
to the U.S. Department of Interior, the federal government alone 
collected over $100 billion in oil and gas revenues between 2005-2015. 
A further limitation of the paper is that it does not effectively 
address uncertainty in calculations from the environmental costs of oil 
and gas use, especially given advances in control technologies. Air 
pollution costs are especially uncertain given the advances in the U.S. 
on control technologies and cleaner fuels. The paper has not been peer 
reviewed and should not be relied upon for any important policy 
conclusions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ David Coady, et al. Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: 
An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates. IMF working paper, May 
2019. See https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/
Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-
Level-Estimates-46509.

    Question 3. Could you provide more context to the claims made by 
the Administration and the Majority that halting OCS production will 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
reduce carbon emissions?

    Answer. The claims made by the Administration and the Majority that 
halting OCS production will reduce carbon emissions is driven by 
computer modeling effort that concludes that halting U.S. domestic 
production would yield higher world equilibrium oil prices sufficiently 
to lower world demand by enough volume to reduce worldwide GHG 
emissions. The model is based on a very simplistic description of the 
world oil market. For example, OPEC might decide to pursue a price 
target by merely adjusting output for incremental production from non-
OPEC producers and U.S. output would merely shift to foreign producers. 
If U.S. policies to limit domestic production were to drive up world 
natural gas prices, Asian electric power producers might switch out of 
gas to coal or direct crude burn. U.S. policy makers may decide that 
high petroleum prices risk energy security or are politically 
unacceptable and request OPEC producers to expand output.
    None of these are speculative statements, but events that have 
occurred in the world oil and gas market in just the last 12 months.
    Here the central point is that attempting to calculate a global GHG 
emission estimate from a single oil and gas lease sale provides little 
useful information against the global uncertainties of future energy 
use and emissions. Policy development on the role of domestic oil 
production should include an analysis of the broad range of 
consequences beyond implications of a simple variable, i.e., GHG 
emissions. Asking policy makers to consider a single variable is likely 
to be misleading and ignore other important considerations.

    Question 4. In terms of environmental justice, how are minorities 
and low-income families affected by rising gasoline prices?

    Answer. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that poverty rates 
for Black and Hispanic households, although declining between 2015-
2019, are still about twice as high as among white households. In 2019, 
the share of Blacks in poverty was 1.8 times greater than their share 
among the general population. Blacks represented 13.2% of the total 
population in the United States, but 23.8% of the poverty population. 
The share of Hispanics in poverty was 1.5 times more than their share 
in the general population. Hispanics comprised 18.7% of the total 
population, but 28.1% of the population in poverty.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ John Creamer, U.S. Bureau of Census. Inequalities Persist 
Despite Decline in Poverty for All Major Race and Hispanic Origin 
Groups. See https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/poverty-
rates-for-blacks-and-hispanics-reached-historic-lows-in-2019.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    U.S. energy policies which seek to curtail the production of legacy 
fuels without adequate low-cost substitutes are especially harmful to 
low-income and minority communities. While the increase in gasoline 
prices increases costs for all drivers, and especially commuters, 
workers from households whose income is below the federal poverty level 
pay a larger proportion of their income for gas. The most comprehensive 
data on this topic is from the American Community Survey undertaken in 
2006 published by the Urban Institute.
    Low-income commuters on average have slightly shorter commutes 
(19.5 minutes) than those with incomes above the poverty level (23 
minutes). However, because their incomes are much lower, poor commuters 
spend a much higher proportion of their wages on gas (8.6 versus 2.1 
percent at $4/gal). As gas prices double, the increase in costs 
represents a disproportionate increase in the burden for below-poverty 
commuters--from $2/gal, the increase takes 4.3 percent of income from 
below-poverty commuters and 1.0 percent from those above poverty.
    As shown in the Figure below when the price of gasoline rises from 
$2 to $4 per gallon households with income below the poverty line 
experience an increase of wages going to gasoline from approximately 4% 
to 8%. Any discussion of environmental justice should also include the 
consequences of environmental policies that raise long-term gasoline 
prices.

[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Mr. Pugliaresi, for your 
testimony. I thank the panel, all the panelists, for their 
testimony.
    I want to remind the Members that Committee Rule 3(d) 
imposes a 5-minute limit on questions.
    The Chair will now recognize Members for any questions they 
may wish to ask the witnesses, and I am going to recognize 
myself first for 5 minutes of questions.
    Before I begin, I want to thank the Ranking Member for his 
very kind words at the beginning, and I hope that this year we 
continue our relationship, our respect for each other, and 
respect for all the members of the Committee. I think the 
strength of Congress is when we may not all agree, but that we 
have great respect for each other, and we listen to each other.
    All right, I am going to follow up my first question with 
Mr. Sarinsky, and I want to follow up on what you have already 
talked about, but just to kind of reiterate and to clarify, Mr. 
Sarinsky.
    You know that in this Committee many of the supporters of 
offshore drilling argue that, if we don't drill here in the 
United States--they make the argument that drilling would 
increase in other countries and emissions would go up. That is 
a kind of a logical interpretation of where they are, and it is 
understandable. And BOEM's current 5-year leasing plan cites 
this very argument as a reason to hold lease sales. So, that 
argument is out there.
    And the question is, do you agree with BOEM's analysis that 
emissions would increase in the absence of new leasing?
    Mr. Sarinsky. I do not agree with it. The economists I work 
with do not agree with it. And more importantly, Federal courts 
have rejected it and Interior has since disclaimed it.
    So, if I could provide a little bit of context, at a high 
level, Interior's assessment was based off this idea that 
almost all extraction that occurred on Federal waters would 
occur elsewhere if they were not to occur on Federal waters. 
That simply is not how economics works. It violates basic 
supply and demand principles. And in reality, while there would 
be some substitution effect, what we see is that extraction on 
Federal lands leads to a very large increase, overall, in total 
combustion and production. So, as a result, you have a very 
large increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
    So, as I said, the Ninth Circuit last year, in 2020, 
rejected, flat out, BOEM's conclusion that the offshore program 
reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It found that there were 
severe modeling limitations, that was the conclusion. And in 
its most recent proposed leasing in the Cook Inlet, which was 
released this past fall, BOEM corrected for that particular 
error that the court identified and found that that leasing 
would result in over 30 million metric tons of additional 
surplus pollution. And that still remains an underestimate due 
to continuing modeling limitations.
    Dr. Lowenthal. So, you are saying that, in part, BOEM's 
analysis is flawed, that original, and that it is changing. Can 
you explain where BOEM is now, and how it is changing?
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes. BOEM's prior analysis assumes--in the 
2016 5-year plan, BOEM's analysis assumes that foreign 
consumption would be unaffected by domestic production. That 
makes no economic sense. Energy is a global market, so effects 
that occur in the United States affect the entire world.
    The court, the Ninth Circuit, patently rejected that 
conclusion. They said it is irrational. There was a second 
court, the District of Alaska, that followed suit, so now two 
courts have rejected that conclusion. And since then, BOEM has 
updated its modeling to correct for that issue. So, it now 
finds that there are substantial increases in foreign 
greenhouse gas consumption as a result of domestic fossil fuel 
reduction.
    And as I said, there are still severe issues with some 
modeling that a number of economists have pointed out that, if 
those were corrected, would show that there is even further 
greenhouse gas emission surplus as a result of U.S. production.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you. I want to turn to Dr. Wright.
    Dr. Wright, you participated in the Interior Department's 
forum on the Federal oil and gas program, and last June you 
published an Op-Ed calling for the Interior Department to 
incorporate environmental justice into offshore leasing 
reforms.
    What were your thoughts on the leasing report the 
Department of the Interior released in November?
    Dr. Wright. Well, first of all, thank you for that 
question.
    But the report, to some extent, gave us a little bit of 
hope, because it seemed to really speak to trying to find a way 
to measure some of the impacts that it would have on 
environmental justice communities. What we would like the 
Department to do is to develop an analysis, a real working 
analysis, to determine the impact that these leases will have 
on environmental justice communities.
    Right now, the only thing that we have is something that is 
more anecdotal, and I could go into a lot of details as it 
relates to how the leasing program is really a gateway to 
climate change that, in turn, leads to all the negative effects 
that we have been dealing with at this point.
    We would just like to see more done, a better analysis that 
includes environmental justice communities in the decisions 
that they are making and also allow us to review the new leases 
that they are looking at to be giving out.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Can you kind of tie it up? We are a little 
bit over time.
    Dr. Wright. Yes, so I guess, in general, I just want to say 
that we certainly appreciate the fact that the office is now 
beginning to think about including environmental justice 
communities in their evaluation of new leases. We are, in fact, 
though, asking that they develop a real environmental justice 
analysis for new leases and look at the impact it is having on 
our communities.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Dr. Wright.
    [Pause.]
    Mr. Stauber. Mr. Chair, can you hear me?
    You are on mute, my assumption is.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Now I can hear you. I think we are both on 
the same wavelength. Sometimes it takes a while for us to get 
on the same wavelength, but we are there.
    Mr. Stauber. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    Real quick, Mr. Sarinsky, are you saying that in 2016, when 
the Obama administration brought their BOEM report out, it was 
inaccurate, then?
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes, the modeling was severely flawed, and 
Federal courts have rejected it.
    Mr. Stauber. So, the Obama administration was wrong?
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes.
    Mr. Stauber. OK.
    Mr. Pugliaresi, thank you so much for joining us. You 
discussed in your testimony how Gulf production means 
significantly less emissions. If we were to shut down 
production outright in the Gulf, as this Administration 
attempted to do, would we see an increase in oil and gas 
imports, and therefore an increase in emissions?
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Absolutely. We would see a very substantial 
increase.
    Keep in mind that, between 2010 and 2020--and by the way, I 
agree with Mr. Sarinsky that the market model is a horrible 
model. But if you step back and you look at the growth in 
global petroleum demand between 2010 and 2020, the United 
States provided 80 percent of that. In the absence of U.S. 
production, oil prices would be substantially higher. Americans 
would be suffering large economic losses. And what is happening 
now is a picnic, compared to what that would look like.
    And I think the key point here is that the notion that you 
can't--it is like the drug war, that somehow you can stop 
demand by cutting off supply. It is just not correct. And until 
we have the fuels of the future in place that provide cost 
effective substitutes for the fuels Americans need now, these 
strategies of cutting off supply are going to fail, and fail 
miserably. And they are also going to undermine public support 
for the transition strategy.
    Mr. Stauber. Mr. Pugliaresi, thank you for those comments. 
And I will just say that really in the northern climates like 
Minnesota, when it is really cold out we depend on that energy 
that is affordable and reliable.
    And I think it is important that we continue to work and 
explore for oil and gas in the Gulf, because that is--even 
though there are some folks on the other side of the aisle that 
say it is not going to increase emissions--it just seems 
logical that it will.
    And then another argument made by the Majority and this 
Administration is that we simply don't need oil and gas 
development because our energy sources are transitioning. Would 
shutting down offshore production shift demand to alternative 
energies like wind or solar?
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Absolutely not. For example, the first case 
was that you can see from the data that it is the massive 
increase in U.S. natural gas that has been the largest 
contributor to U.S. reductions in global greenhouse gas 
emissions. And we face a lot of obstacles in transitioning to 
the fuels of the future, including electric vehicles.
    We are going to produce more electric vehicles. We are 
going to produce more alternative fuels. But the pace at which 
that happens is highly overestimated. And if we try to remove 
the legacy fuels now, before the transition fuels are in place, 
it is going to cause enormous dislocations to the American 
economy and the American people.
    Mr. Stauber. How much time do I have, Mr. Chair?
    Dr. Lowenthal. You have a little over 1 minute.
    Mr. Stauber. OK, and same line of questioning, how would 
shutting down offshore production again--like this 
Administration attempted to do--impact revenues for 
conservation in Louisiana, Alabama, and other parts of the 
country?
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Yes. As you can see, the Gulf of Mexico 
itself provides half of the royalty payments to the Federal 
Government, well in excess--anywhere between, year to year, 
from $4 to $8 billion. If you lose those revenues, some of 
those--many of those revenues--go to Gulf restoration and the 
Land and Water Conservation Fund. Where are we going to find 
the funds for that? I don't think--it is not thought out at 
all.
    Mr. Stauber. Well, I thank you very much for your expert 
and factual testimony.
    Mr. Chair, I yield back.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Mr. Ranking Member. Now I would 
like to call upon Mr. McEachin for 5 minutes of questions.
    Welcome, Mr. McEachin.
    Mr. McEachin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and let me begin by 
echoing the sentiments of the Ranking Member. I have enjoyed 
serving with you during my time in Congress. I have learned 
from you, and I hope that we will be able to continue our 
relationship even after you are gone fishing.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you.
    Mr. McEachin. Mr. Chairman, I would like to start off by 
asking Dr. Wright.
    Dr. Wright, in 2015 the offshore oil and gas industry in 
Louisiana employed nearly 55,000 workers. That number has since 
dropped by 47 percent, even as they have managed to have 
production soar. This is partly because new technology and 
automation have allowed the offshore oil and gas industry to do 
more with less, so operators have cut jobs to increase profits.
    How can the Biden administration support equitable energy 
solutions in the Gulf that create new, good-paying jobs that 
protect public health and the climate?
    [Pause.]
    Mr. McEachin. I think you are muted.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Dr. Wright, you are still muted. Unmute 
yourself. Thank you.
    Dr. Wright. Yes, I am so sorry. Thank you for that 
question.
    I think that the Biden administration can, to some extent, 
follow the lead of many of us who are working on the ground, 
and that is to find ways to train communities to be able to be 
a part of the workforce in renewable energy.
    The Deep South Center right now has a program with an 
unbelievable record of training young men and women in hazard 
remediation dealing with legacy pollution.
    The point is that these communities that have been most 
affected by climate change and environmental justice issues 
related to toxins are also the people who should be involved in 
the workforce, as we move forward.
    I think that being able to find a way to develop a 
workforce that is, first of all, one that creates jobs, but is 
also environmentally just and creates safe jobs would be the 
way that we should go.
    So, the fact that we are losing jobs in Louisiana and 
across the Gulf Coast with our transitioning to renewable 
energy, but more so because the industry has found a cheaper 
way to be profitable. And as usual, the industry does what is 
necessary for them to make a profit.
    The communities in Louisiana and across the Gulf Coast have 
been suffering, and finding ways to develop a training 
mechanism so that the new jobs that will come out of renewable 
energy projects would also--the benefit would also go to 
communities.
    Mr. McEachin. Thank you so much for that.
    Dr. Dahl, can you speak to some of the most severe effects 
of climate change that communities along the Gulf Coast are 
experiencing?
    And explain how climate change might continue to harm these 
populations years, and even decades, from now.
    Dr. Dahl. Absolutely, thank you for the question. 
Communities along the Gulf Coast are among those that are on 
the front lines of climate change. Sea level is rising faster 
in parts of Louisiana than it is almost anywhere in the world. 
So, we are seeing rates of sea level rise that are already 
profoundly affecting communities there.
    In speaking with communities, I have heard of people who 
live in homes where the house is raised, but they still store 
things under the house. But when there is an extra high tide, 
they know to expect it, they know they are going to flood, and 
they have to remove all of that stuff from under their homes, 
sometimes having a pulley to ratchet it up so that it doesn't 
get wet.
    We have seen what communities call ghost forests in 
Louisiana. These were forests that had served as traditional 
gathering spaces for Indigenous communities. But because sea 
level is now higher, those trees have been inundated with 
saltwater to the point that they have died, and those cultural 
aspects of cultural heritage are disappearing.
    We have also seen the impacts of climate change in the form 
of more intense hurricanes affecting the Gulf Coast. As our 
climate warms, we expect the intensity of hurricanes to 
increase further, which will have impacts for people who live 
along the Gulf Coast, which is one of the most hurricane-prone 
parts of our country.
    Finally, it is important to recognize the importance of 
extreme heat in the Gulf Coast. It is one of the hottest 
regions of our country, and as we warm our climate, we can 
expect the frequency and the intensity of heat waves to 
increase. Often this will combine with other climate-related 
disasters, like we saw in the wake of Hurricane Ida last year, 
where, as people were returning to their homes after evacuating 
for the storm, they were met with a deadly heat wave that 
ultimately killed more people than the hurricane itself.
    So, the Gulf Coast is already experiencing some of the 
effects of climate change, and we can expect all of those to 
grow more intense and more severe in the future, if we fail to 
reduce our emissions.
    Mr. McEachin. Thank you very much.
    And Mr. Chairman, I am over time, so I yield back.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you. I now recognize Representative 
Herrell for 5 minutes of questions.
    Ms. Herrell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all 
the witnesses. I just really appreciate having the opportunity 
for us to work and listen to each other, and just find 
solutions, because this is such an important subject.
    I have a question for Dr. Dahl. I want to make sure I have 
that right, so I just want to ask this very slowly, so it makes 
sense.
    We know that the demand for fossil fuels is not going away. 
I mean, it is growing and growing and growing. So, if we phase 
out fossil fuels, I want to see what is the solution. What are 
your thoughts on how do we protect the environment, or climate, 
when then we would rely on other nations to produce energy?
    If we cut our energy production here in America, but they 
have an uptick, say in China or Ukraine or Russia, they don't 
fall within the same regulatory confines that we do. How do we 
protect the environment consistently, if we cut production 
here, and yet see more production from other countries that 
don't live within those same requirements?
    Because China, for instance, is building 200 power plants a 
year. They are really driving the force here. But if we are 
going to be honest about climate, we have to look, I think, at 
more of a global solution.
    Dr. Dahl. Absolutely, climate change is a global problem. 
So, the solutions to it have to be global, as well.
    In the United States, we know that we have contributed 
about 25 percent of all of the historical carbon emissions that 
have entered the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. 
So, we are responsible for about a quarter of the warming that 
has resulted.
    Contrast that with the fact that we have just 4 percent of 
the world's population, and you can see that we have had a 
disproportionate effect on the climate problems that we are 
seeing today.
    Ms. Herrell. Right. But wait, I hate to interrupt, but then 
how do we--by cutting it here in America, how do we--it is a 
global problem, and I think our producers around the country 
have done a phenomenal job of lowering CO2 
emissions. And we are producing energy more cleanly, more 
efficiently, more affordably than any other country in the 
world. And I understand the populations, what you are--but how 
do we really protect the environment if we are not going to 
hold the other countries to the same standards?
    Because that is where I see the problem is, and that is 
what I think the bigger solution needs to come from.
    Dr. Dahl. Sure. We will need to see other countries, other 
major emitters like China, Australia, the European Union 
cutting their emissions, as well, in line with what the science 
tells us we need to do. But----
    Ms. Herrell. Do you see that happening? Are there 
conversations happening, say, with China or other countries 
now?
    I mean, are they working on that? Are you aware of 
anything?
    Dr. Dahl. There are ongoing conversations, particularly 
through the COP process, Conference of Parties, where they meet 
every year and discuss goals that would help us to get to the 
goals of the Paris Climate Agreement----
    [Audio malfunction.]
    Ms. Herrell. Thank you.
    Dr. Dahl. Yes.
    Ms. Herrell. Thank you very much, because I just want to 
ask one more question to Dr. Pugliaresi---- and I am sure I 
said that completely wrong.
    But just very quickly, talking about the crisis over in 
Europe, and where we have been cautioned, especially from the 
French Government, who had to ask their largest utility 
facility to artificially lower prices, can you expand on the 
choices that certain Western European nations have made that 
have led to the crisis, and what we should take away from it as 
we consider U.S. energy policies?
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Yes, there are sort of two problems, I 
think, in the European side. One is they went to a very narrow 
set of fuel choices. They abandoned--particularly the Germans--
they abandoned nuclear power. They tried to shut down their--
actually, their coal is resurging now--and they limited their 
utility system to a very risky set of fuel choices, and natural 
gas being one of them, and lots of wind and solar.
    And you can see that there was a disruption in Britain, 
wind supplies in the North Sea began to slow down, and they 
didn't have the traditional baseload fuels.
    So, there is a lesson here. We can move to these fuels of 
the future, but if they are intermittent, we have to make sure 
they reach a certain stability, and they have an adequate 
backup, because we don't have the battery technology yet to 
support these intermittent fuels. And I think it is a kind of 
aspirational attempt to reach an aspirational goal without 
having the technology in place yet.
    Ms. Herrell. Thank you.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back and, again, I appreciate the 
witness testimony and you putting this meeting together. Thank 
you.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you. I now recognize Representative 
Levin for 5 minutes of questions.
    Welcome, Mike.
    Mr. Levin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank you 
publicly for your many outstanding years representing Southern 
California. It really has been just an honor to serve with you, 
and I hope we can continue your legacy of exemplary service for 
Southern California, and also the example of statesmanship that 
you have set.
    I want to thank you for this hearing. I think it is really 
important, as we wrestle with the long-standing issues around 
existing offshore oil and gas leasing, and consider how 
incompatible our Federal oil and gas program is with our 
efforts to stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
    In addition to my concerns about climate impacts, I am also 
cognizant of the negative effects of offshore drilling on local 
communities. I think many of you know that my district last 
year experienced the negative impacts of the Orange County oil 
spill. And even months after 25,000 gallons of oil were 
discharged into our waters in Southern California, I still see 
the devastating impacts that the spill had on our fisheries, on 
our local businesses, and the public. And I still worry a great 
deal about the longer-term effects of the spill.
    Dr. Wright, I will begin with you. Given your background in 
environmental justice work in the Gulf, can you share how 
communities in the Gulf similarly suffer from both the direct 
and the indirect consequences of offshore drilling?
    [Audio malfunction.]
    Dr. Wright. Directly, the communities in the Gulf Coast 
have suffered from offshore drilling, because they live in 
close proximity to these particular facilities. That means that 
all of the toxic pollution--and just tons of it--are in their 
neighborhoods, and they have suffered in terms of their health.
    But I wanted to just give you an example of what these 
communities deal with. They deal with things like their screens 
rusting and falling off their windows every 6 months, 
everything dying downwind from petrochemical facilities is--
that could have direct connections to offshore drilling or the 
pipelines.
    But specifically, I think it is important that I mention 
that in Louisiana, in particular, we have been dealing with 
these problems for many, many years. And communities have been 
seeing oil pods on the sand near their homes for a long time. 
We are just now learning how many unplugged facilities actually 
exist and are affecting our communities.
    The cancer rates are extremely high, because there is an 
absolute connection between offshore drilling and petrochemical 
facilities, and our communities are fence line to and fighting 
for survival.
    The fact that we are thinking about leasing more land is 
something that boggles our minds, because we already don't know 
how to deal with the pollution that we have right now, with the 
numbers of pipelines that are affecting us.
    I believe that it is hard for us to understand how more of 
something that is bad for you is better for all of us, and that 
the economic impacts that exist outweigh our health interests 
when, in fact, in Louisiana, with some of the highest cancer 
rates in the Nation.
    So, when you really look at the impact, the good that comes 
out of the production of oil in Louisiana creates so much bad 
that it does not balance out.
    Mr. Levin. Thank you.
    Dr. Wright. But in the end, we are talking about saving the 
planet. Sorry.
    Mr. Levin. Thank you, Dr. Wright. I want to make sure to 
move on and ask Mr. Sarinsky.
    You noted in your testimony, under the Outer Continental 
Shelf Lands Act, BOEM is explicitly required to balance the 
production of oil and gas with--and I quote--``protection of 
the human, marine, and coastal environments.'' Listening to Dr. 
Wright, it doesn't seem that the continued oil and gas leasing 
program meets that criteria, that statutory criteria, to ensure 
the protection of the human, marine, and coastal environment.
    Given these concerns, I was wondering if you could speak to 
the legal authorities that the Secretary of the Interior has 
when it comes to reforming the offshore oil and gas program. 
First, is the Secretary required to hold every lease sale 
included in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's final 5-
year leasing program?
    Mr. Sarinsky. No, the statute specifically provides that it 
doesn't, and numerous prior lease sales have been canceled----
    Mr. Levin. So, theoretically, BOEM's next 5-year leasing 
plan could have zero sales?
    Mr. Sarinsky. I believe so, yes. That would bear reading 
the statute, yes.
    Mr. Levin. I appreciate that answer. I just want to be 
clear. I personally believe that including any new leasing in 
BOEM's upcoming 5-year plan would be at odds with the 
Administration's stated climate and environmental justice 
goals. And that is why I urge the Administration to move 
forward on a 5-year leasing plan that does not include new 
leasing. I believe it is the way we need to move forward toward 
a zero-carbon future.
    With that, Mr. Chairman, following your example, I hope we 
can all disagree without being disagreeable, following your 
lead. With that, I will yield back, and thank you for all you 
do.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you. I now recognize the 
Representative from Louisiana, Representative Graves, for 5 
minutes of questions.
    Mr. Graves. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for having this 
hearing. Unfortunately, I want to spend the first couple of 
minutes actually going back and addressing some of the comments 
that were made by the witnesses.
    First of all, Dr. Wright, you have suggested that energy 
production is racist in Louisiana. I represent south Louisiana, 
and I have to tell you, I am actually kind of offended by that. 
I think the facts show something a little bit different.
    Some of the parishes that are closest to energy production 
in Louisiana, parishes like Plaquemines Parish, Lafourche, 
Terrebonne, and Cameron Parish--in Cameron Parish, for example, 
4 percent of the population is actually Black, 4 percent. In 
the case of Plaquemines Parish, on the high end, 21 percent, 
which means the remaining 79 percent, they are non-Black. In 
Lafourche Parish, it is 15 percent, and in Terrebonne Parish, 
it is 19 percent. So, to suggest that this activity is racist 
is just--it is not factual and it is very concerning.
    Mr. Sarinsky, you said that the law doesn't require leases. 
The Western District of Louisiana disagrees with that and has 
actually forced them to hold leases. In fact, the law requires 
that leases happen ``expeditiously.''
    Next, if we are going to stop leasing in the Gulf of Mexico 
or otherwise, we have some of the lowest emission rates in the 
world, as indicated by testimony by the last witness. All that 
does is squeeze a balloon and cause production to happen in 
other areas, as we have had career Department officials, career 
Department of the Interior officials, testify before the 
Committee. All it does, when we stop domestic production, is 
increase our dependence upon foreign energy sources with 
greater emissions.
    Cutting production in the United States increases global 
emissions. Shame on us for not recognizing the flawed 
approaches of California, what has happened in New England and 
the UK, where their strategies that some of you are pushing 
have resulted in higher emissions and unaffordable energy, 
disproportionately impacting, in some cases, communities of 
color and impoverished communities. That is not the solution.
    Next, this Department of Energy, under the Biden 
administration, has projected that we are going to have an 
increase in energy demand. In fact, as I recall, I think a 30 
percent increase in natural gas demand alone between now and 
2030, I believe. So, if there is going to be this increase in 
demand--the IEA says a 50 percent increase in global energy 
demand, I mean, why would we not produce it where we can 
produce it with the lowest emissions?
    Last, Mr. Sarinsky, you indicated that in the assessment by 
Interior, they failed to take into consideration the 
international impacts by using the fuels in other countries. 
OK, that is a good point. So, let's take into consideration 
what happens when we stop producing here, and you increase 
global emissions. You have a net increase in global emissions. 
The facts history shows that is exactly what happens. Shame on 
us for not recognizing this evidence that is out there right 
now. We have shown strategies that result lower emissions, 
lower energy prices, and prosperity for Americans. That is what 
we need to be doing.
    Ms. Dahl, I represent south Louisiana. That is where I live 
and represent. I actually ran the coastal program, the 
resilience program for the state. Fascinating, listening to 
others come in and describe what is going on.
    Yes, we have some of the fastest--you left out a key word--
relative sea rise. That is because we are having some of the 
greatest subsidence or sinking rates in the world because of 
how the Federal Government, Republican and Democrat 
administrations, have mismanaged the Mississippi River system. 
Don't leave these things out. These are important facts. We are 
going to go out there and pose solutions that don't solve any 
problems.
    We have to stop focusing on the source of energy, and 
instead focus on the emissions. It doesn't matter if we use 
natural gas, if we burn heating oil, as they are doing up in 
the Northeast right now, or if we do solar. We have to stay 
focused on the emissions. Let innovators innovate. We have 
proven we can use natural gas at net-zero emissions. For every 
ton of emissions we produce in the United States, China has 
gone up by four. This doesn't make sense.
    Mr. Pugliaresi, I just want to ask you very quickly. If we 
stop producing energy in the United States: (1) will we see a 
global reduction in emissions? And (2) what is going to happen 
with energy? Are we suddenly going to all go to renewable 
energy sources?
    Mr. Pugliaresi. No, we have to be really concerned about 
failure modes of implementing the energy transition.
    The United States, which has very high environmental 
standards--and, of course, we can always do better--if we 
reduce the legacy fuels here before we are ready to transition, 
they are just going to be produced somewhere else. And that is 
going to be worse for the local environment and for global 
emissions.
    Mr. Graves. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you. I now recognize--let's see, who 
am I waiting for?
    Is that Representative McCollum? Representative McCollum, I 
recognize you for 5 minutes of questions. Welcome, Betty.
    Ms. McCollum. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am at a slight 
disadvantage here with how I had set up my screen, so I am 
doing my own self-timer here, so I can see a clock. Mr. Chair, 
there is time to say goodbye later. Right now, my dear friend 
Alan, it is a joy to work with you.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you.
    Ms. McCollum. I want to maybe take this on a little bit of 
a different direction, because we have some great testimony 
here.
    Dr. Wright, you have extensive work in working with 
communities that are most directly impacted by toxic exposure 
and environmental hazards. You pointed that out. And most of 
the offshore oil and gas in the United States does come from 
the Gulf region, which means these local communities have borne 
the cost of our fossil fuel dependence development.
    And you pointed out, and you can show scientifically, the 
health and environmental burdens of the Gulf, fossil fuels and 
the petroleum industry have disproportionately harmed 
communities and disproportionately we can show through health 
records, when they are fully available, that Black and 
Indigenous communities have suffered the most.
    But other communities around in the area, including Latino, 
Asian, Caucasian, other communities have also been affected by 
these health disparities. But it targets, in certain areas 
where development has taken place, some communities more 
significantly than others, and I thank you for pointing that 
out.
    I believe that Congress has to take responsibility for 
helping all those communities recover, and we can do it in many 
different ways. And one of the ways that I think we can do it--
and I have spoken to many members on this Committee about a 
piece of legislation that I am working on--is the Mississippi 
River and Restoration Resiliency Initiative.
    Now, Mr. Stauber and I are home to--well, he has the 
headwaters. I am a little farther south. But Minnesota is home 
to the headwaters of the Mississippi River. It is a working 
river. It is a vibrant river. I grew up in a barge town. It is 
a river which supplies drinking water for so many Americans, 
including in the large metropolitan area that I represent, St. 
Paul, and the adjacent Minneapolis. It is recreation. It is 
habitat.
    But my bill would also begin to address some of the legacy 
issues that you pointed out, Ms. Wright, including funding and 
activities for environmental justice for communities from the 
headwaters to the Gulf.
    How do you think the Federal Government can work in a focus 
of justice and equity for all Americans, especially those that 
have been impacted by offshore oil and gas drilling, moving 
forward?
    So, we have a legacy issue, and we are talking about 
whether or not we continue that legacy. But I would like to 
just take a second and have you talk about some of the legacy 
issues you think the Federal Government should be focused on.
    I also serve on the Interior and Natural Resources 
Committee, where the EPA is located.
    Thank you.
    Dr. Wright. Thank you for that question.
    I do want to say to my fellow Louisianian that in his 
report he selected certain communities with the racial 
demographics that supported his report. But I also live in 
Louisiana, and he is insulted that I was saying that this is 
racist, and I want him to know that I am also insulted by 
racism that I live with every day.
    Now to your question. The legacy pollution that exists for 
a lot of our communities has a lot to do with Superfund sites 
and all the--before we knew better, the things that we did with 
industry. What we are finding is that communities affected by 
offshore drilling are in places now where their communities or 
their homes are going underwater.
    I think Louisiana was the first area to deal with 
communities that are now displaced, or environmental refugees. 
But we have so many communities living on toxic land. So, 
finding ways to relocate these communities, for one thing, 
would be very important, and doing it in a way that that land 
is then reclaimed for things like a solar farm, or solar panel 
fields, which is one of the things that we have been pushing 
for in our community, with a 30-year fight to move a community 
off of a Superfund site.
    There are all kinds of ways that we can take this land that 
is now no longer usable for humans, and we would have a hard 
time cleaning it up, to get it there, turning it into renewable 
energy types of projects like solar fields. The communities 
need to be relocated.
    And our communities need to be trained. We need to have a 
vibrant workforce that trains young men and women of all races, 
all ages who are interested in getting us to transition to this 
renewable economy, learning how to do solar, how to do wind, 
how to do hydro, create really wonderful jobs, and at the same 
time clean up our communities. Thank you.
    Ms. McCollum. Thank you. And as you can hear, Mr. Chair, my 
timer went off, and my time is up. Thank you.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Yes, thank you. I now recognize 
Representative Tiffany for 5 minutes of questions.
    Welcome.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it very 
much.
    Ms. Dahl, in your testimony, you said we have precious 
little time, and we are decades late in making the shift--I am 
assuming to alternative energies. And before me here I have an 
article from April 28, 1975, Peter Gwynne in Newsweek, ``The 
Cooling World,'' where it says there will be a global disaster, 
food shortages, unpredictable and crazy weather events, and, of 
course, politicians refusing to act in the face of these 
undeniable realities. Isn't this just a political effort to 
control people's lives, this doomsday, sky-is-falling rhetoric 
that we hear?
    Dr. Dahl. Thank you for the question. Absolutely not. This 
is not political rhetoric. This is science.
    And back in the 1970s, there was a brief moment when there 
was worry about global cooling. Since then it has become 
abundantly clear, through thousands upon thousands of 
scientific studies, that we are warming our planet, and that 
the results of that warming could become irreversible and 
devastating for people around the world.
    Mr. Tiffany. Thank you very much.
    Dr. Dahl. It is very clear.
    Mr. Tiffany. And the operative word there is ``could,'' and 
we hear ``could,'' ``might,'' ``shall,'' because it is all 
based on models, no different than back in the mid-1970s, when 
the sky was going to fall, and we were going to have mass 
famines by the year 2000.
    Mr. Pugliaresi, did China sign on to the Glasgow Accords--I 
don't know exactly what they call it, but call it the Paris 
Accords--at their most recent summit in Glasgow?
    Mr. Pugliaresi. So, I mean, they agreed to take certain 
measures. I think there is a general out in the Paris Agreement 
in which, if the measures undertaken in attempting to get these 
goals results in enormous economic hardship, the nation states 
can adjust their plans accordingly.
    Mr. Tiffany. So, they have an out, is basically what you 
are saying.
    Mr. Pugliaresi. They have an out, and they have not given 
us firm targets. I can tell you that.
    Mr. Tiffany. Yes, absolutely. They have not given us firm 
targets, there is no doubt about it.
    We are seeing these huge price spikes in Europe, where some 
alternative energies are failing them over there, as you have 
highlighted. So, what alternative source of energy are they 
using now to be able to power people's--to give people 
electricity?
    Mr. Pugliaresi. They are using less energy and higher 
prices. It is a very bad outcome.
    Mr. Tiffany. And have they switched to coal? Has coal been 
their backup for----
    Mr. Pugliaresi. Their fascination with getting rid of 
nuclear power after Fukushima, they are actually spiking their 
coal use in Germany now, particularly very low-quality lignite 
coal.
    Mr. Tiffany. Yes, so here comes, alternative energy is coal 
now. Whereas, in the United States, we are smart enough to 
produce enough natural gas.
    One year ago, today, President Biden signaled to the United 
States and the world that we are going to become more dependent 
on alternatives, and we are not going to allow an all-of-the-
above approach, that we are going to end fossil fuel use, or 
attempt to do it with the shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline. 
Investors have heeded those words, and we have seen increased 
prices.
    And I just say to all the panelists, regardless of where 
you come from, why should my constituents be paying twice as 
much for their home heating fuel this winter? Why should 
gasoline be costing almost a dollar a gallon more?
    I mean, I have cited this frequently. Propane costs $.80 a 
gallon as a home heating fuel, which a quarter of my 
constituents use in northern Wisconsin. They paid that in 
August 2020, and in August 2021 they were paying $1.50 a 
gallon. And I know, because I dug the bills out. I heat my home 
with propane, along with 25 percent of my constituents.
    Is that the direction that we want to go here in America? 
Because that is exactly what is happening.
    And the final point that I would make, I find this really 
ironic, this hearing today, when yesterday we were hearing the 
bill RAWA, Recovering American Wildlife Act, which was unpaid 
for, $1.3 billion a year, $13 billion over 10 years. And that 
is the reason I did not vote for the bill, because it was not 
paid for. And here we have the opportunity, with things like 
offshore leases and being able to produce oil, to be able to 
pay for some of those things, and we are saying no, we are not 
going to do it. Fossil fuels have been paying the bills, in 
many cases, for improvements in the environment, and we should 
never forget that.
    I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Representative Tiffany. I now 
recognize Representative Porter.
    Welcome. Five minutes of questions.
    Ms. Porter. Thank you very much. And I have some pollution 
going on in a neighbor's yard right now from a gas-powered leaf 
blower, so I apologize if you can hear that in the background.
    I wanted to start with Dr. Dahl.
    Does oil leaked from pipelines stay in the surrounding 
environment?
    Dr. Dahl. No, it does not. When oil is leaked from drilling 
equipment or a pipeline, it goes where the environment is going 
to take it. So, if it happens in the ocean, that is going to 
depend on things like the ocean currents, where they are going, 
the pace with which they are going.
    And we know, from major oil districts like the 2010 
Deepwater Horizon oil spill that happened in the Gulf of 
Mexico, that the oil disperses over a very large area. In that 
case, it was thousands of square miles, and up and down the 
entire water column of the Gulf of Mexico.
    Ms. Porter. And we saw this, we heard about this. We had a 
field hearing, Chairman Lowenthal and I, following the rupture 
of a pipeline off the coast of Orange County, and we had 
poisonous petroleum tar balls washing up on our shores. And Dr. 
David Ballantyne told us exactly what you did, that that 
pollution will spread. It could wind up in lots of other areas. 
He gave an example of a pipeline leaking off the coast of 
Brazil in 2019 that wound up polluting and sending oil off our 
coast in Florida.
    So, understanding that oil from pipelines that leak in the 
Gulf could end up on beaches further away, Dr. Dahl, from a 
broader climate perspective, not just a direct pollution 
perspective, from a broader climate perspective, does the 
source of carbon dioxide emissions matter, or is damage to the 
climate the same, whether we are talking about the Gulf of 
Mexico or the coast of California?
    Dr. Dahl. It does not matter where carbon dioxide is 
emitted on the planet. It will affect the entire planet. Carbon 
dioxide mixes very quickly into our atmosphere. So, when you 
look at the globe, there is not much variation from place to 
place.
    Now, that is not to say that there aren't cleaner and 
dirtier forms of fossil fuels in the sense that some will emit 
more carbon dioxide than others. But as a whole, it doesn't 
matter where that carbon dioxide is coming from, your emissions 
or my emissions or People of China's emissions.
    Ms. Porter. Dr. Sarinsky, does the Department of the 
Interior subsidize oil and gas drilling?
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes, it does, in quite a number of----
    Ms. Porter. Can you tell us how?
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes, absolutely. So, just to give a little 
bit of context here, there was an IMF study that found that in 
the year 2020 the Federal Government, on the whole, subsidized 
fossil fuels by $660 billion. That was just in 1 year.
    In terms of the Federal oil and gas leasing program, the 
main subsidies are in the form of very beneficial fiscal terms 
for oil and gas drilling, where, basically, the harm that is 
being caused by oil and gas extraction is being borne by the 
public, by and large, rather than by fossil fuel extraction.
    Just to give one example, Congress last year passed, I 
believe, $4.7 billion to clean up orphaned wells. Those are 
damages that were caused by the industry that now the public is 
footing the bill, and that could be solved by increasing 
bonding requirements, for instance.
    Ms. Porter. Dr. Sarinsky, I want to make sure I heard you, 
because sometimes these numbers get big. So, I just want to 
repeat this back, and please correct me if I am wrong. You just 
cited an IMF study suggesting that the U.S. taxpayers are 
spending $660 billion a year subsidizing fossil fuels. Did I 
get that right?
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes, that is an explicit and implicit 
subsidy. But yes, you got that absolutely right.
    Ms. Porter. $660 billion?
    Mr. Sarinsky. $660 billion.
    Ms. Porter. Wow. So, Dr. Dahl, how much money did extreme 
weather-related disasters cost taxpayers last year?
    Dr. Dahl. The compilation that was done by the National 
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just earlier this month 
showed that, just in 2021, there was at least $145 billion in 
climate and weather-related disasters across the country.
    Ms. Porter. So, to summarize, taxpayers are subsidizing, to 
an eye-popping number, oil and gas drilling from various 
methods, and we are incentivizing fossil fuels at the expense 
of clean energy technology. And then taxpayers are spending 
billions of dollars cleaning up the damage caused by both 
emissions, through things like abandoned wells and by extreme 
weather events caused by climate change. Taxpayers are, 
literally, being asked to foot both sides of the bill here, to 
both help companies extract and then to help companies clean up 
from extracting.
    That is a lot of money that we could be putting toward 
transitioning to clean energy, creating new jobs for the 
future, and actually bringing down costs for American families. 
This seems like a really unfair deal to me.
    I yield back.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you. I now welcome a colleague from--I 
believe, the state of Mississippi--or Alabama, Representative 
Carl.
    Welcome to the Committee, Representative.
    Mr. Carl. Thank you, Chairman and Ranking Member. I 
appreciate the opportunity to come and to be a part of this. 
Obviously, I am not on this Committee, but I have a lot at 
stake, obviously, being in south Alabama.
    I want to start with just a quick question of the 
witnesses, which--thank you to the witnesses for taking time. 
But just a yes or no, because I have a limited amount of time, 
and I want to focus on something different. But are any of the 
witnesses aware of any evidence that shows restricting oil and 
gas production in Federal waters will actually result in 
decreasing the total consumption of oil in the United States?
    [No response.]
    Mr. Carl. So, by not drilling, will it decrease in Federal 
waters, will it decrease the consumption in the United States? 
Is there any study to back that up?
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes.
    Mr. Carl. Who said yes? I am sorry, I can't see who it is.
    Mr. Sarinsky. I did.
    [Pause.]
    Mr. Carl. OK, all right, Max? OK, good.
    Mr. Sarinsky. Yes. Do you want me to elaborate on that, 
or----
    Mr. Carl. Yes. If you will, real quickly, tell me where the 
study is at, where I can find it, and where I can pull it up.
    Mr. Sarinsky. I mean, Interior's own analysis finds this.
    Mr. Carl. I want the study. I want to know exactly where it 
is at. I just don't want an opinion. I want----
    Mr. Sarinsky. It is Interior's MarketSim model, which was 
most recently updated in 2021, and was presented in the Cook 
Inlet lease sale. And it finds that fossil fuel extraction 
domestically is substituting, in part, for renewable energy 
that would be consumed domestically. And----
    Mr. Carl. Who put that together?
    Mr. Sarinsky. I am sorry, sir?
    Mr. Carl. Who put that together? Who put those findings 
together?
    Mr. Sarinsky. The Department of the Interior at BOEM.
    Mr. Carl. OK, so listening to your opening remarks, it kind 
of blends into what I am going to here. Basically, what I got 
from your opening remarks is higher fuel prices equate into 
less driving. So, by shutting the Gulf leases down, we are 
going to push that production overseas, which is going to drive 
the price up, so equates into less driving. That is what I got 
from your opening statement. I would love to see some 
documentation to actually back that up.
    Dr. Wright, real quick, I am also offended. I will be quite 
honest with you. I was in county government for the past 8 
years, or prior to this job. We got a lot of money from the 
petroleum industry that we used in minority communities. We 
built beaches, we built parks, recreation. We did a 
tremendous--we got waterways for canoeing, and all of this is 
in minority communities.
    So, when you start talking in general about--that all 
production, or these leases damage minority communities, I 
challenge you to come to Alabama and show that to me. I am sure 
you can find a spot somewhere. There is no doubt. But where 
this oil is coming in is in my county, Mobile County. The south 
part of Mobile County probably is 90 percent Caucasian, maybe 
10 percent. That 10 percent that actually live there, most of 
them work in the petroleum industry, because we have a huge gas 
plant right next to us in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
    I challenge you to show me--you are talking about the 
screens rusting? Well, welcome to the Gulf Coast. Everything 
rusts on the Gulf Coast. Stainless steel rusts on the Gulf 
Coast. So, that is it. But to insinuate that it is a minority 
issue, it is bizarre.
    I saw this 10 years ago, when the extreme environmental 
groups couldn't push their theories through the local 
communities, so they latched on to the NAACP. They actually 
showed up at the environmental meetings with jackets on that 
said we are the environmentalists for the NAACP. So, I 
understand where this is coming from, and they are using this 
minority reasoning to push these far extreme theories.
    I know you want to say something, but it is my time, so 
hang on just a second.
    No one wants to get away from petroleum products more than 
the Republican Party, and I am tired of being labeled as the 
group that dislikes the environment.
    The state of Alabama, we are poised, poised, for all the 
technology to happen and come about on electric vehicles. I 
have four companies in the state of Alabama that produce 
automobiles. I have a truck company, and I have a company that 
makes buses. We have Auburn University, we have Tuscaloosa 
University, and we have NASA up in Huntsville: the triangle, as 
I like to call it. We have a huge graphite finding up in Coosa 
County, so we are no longer dependent on that graphite coming 
from China.
    So, no one is going to benefit more from that. But in that 
process we can't just shut petroleum off and drive prices up. I 
had this same conversation with a Black gentleman at the 
airport, on the flight in a few days ago. He says, ``In 3 years 
we will be in electric vehicles, and you can't buy gas.'' That 
is their plan.
    Well, I challenge you to go to the Black community in 
Selma, Alabama. I challenge you to go there and tell them that 
they are going to have to buy a $60,000 electric car. I 
challenge you to tell them that they can't buy any more 
petroleum, because I bet you Terri Sewell will tell you you are 
wrong. And that is true.
    We have to slow down. We have to use common sense. We have 
to quit scaring people with the sky is falling, the sky is 
falling, the sky is falling. We can work through this, 
Republicans and Democrats. We have to start focusing on what 
works and put a plan together, together. We can be one on this 
issue, we truly can. Some of these environmental groups, please 
keep in mind, make a living out of pushing fear. And that is 
where we are at.
    I apologize if I offended anyone. I am passionate about 
this. Again, Dr. Wright, I wish you the best. If you want to 
come to south Alabama, I would love to have you. You and I will 
ride around and look at some of these issues.
    With that, Chairman, I give back my time, thank you.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Thank you, Representative Carl. And again, 
welcome to our Committee. We welcome you any time that you 
would like to come.
    Mr. Carl. Thank you.
    Dr. Lowenthal. I want to thank all of the witnesses for 
their testimony and the Members for their questions.
    Before I end, I want to ask the Ranking Member, is there 
any statement, or anything you would like to say at the end? If 
not, I am going to close the hearing.
    Mr. Stauber. Mr. Chair, thank you, I have an article that I 
would like to enter into the record. It is a January 19, 2022 
article. The title is, ``Eliminating Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas 
Leasing Will Hurt U.S. Climate Achievements, a Consumer Group 
Says.'' So, Mr. Chair, if you will allow it, I would like to 
ask that I can enter that into the official record today.
    Dr. Lowenthal. Without objection, it shall be entered.

    [The information follows:]
Submission for the Record by Rep. Stauber

[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
                                                                

    Mr. Stauber. Thank you.
    Dr. Lowenthal. In closing, I will make a final statement 
also, and it is actually the same statement I made at the 
beginning of the hearing. I am not saying anything more than--
remember, there has been a stockpiling of over 9 million acres 
of non-producing leases off our coastline.
    So, the question is, do we need to keep with having so many 
leases out there?
    And having to meet our climate goals, do we need to sell 
another 1.7 million acres? And that was the initial question 
and issue that I had raised.
    With that, members of the Committee may have some 
additional questions for the witnesses. We are going to ask you 
to respond to them in writing. Under Committee Rule 3(o), 
members of the Committee must submit written witness questions 
within 3 business days following the hearing, and the hearing 
record will be held open for 10 business days for these 
responses.
    If there is no further business, without objection, this 
Subcommittee stands adjourned.

    [Whereupon, at 1:47 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

            [ADDITIONAL MATERIALS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD]

Submissions for the Record by Rep. Lowenthal

                                                   January 20, 2022

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

The Honorable Deb Haaland Secretary
Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20240

    Dear President Biden and Secretary Haaland:

    To protect the nation from catastrophic climate impacts, and to 
ensure this administration continues to meet its historic commitments 
to environmental and racial justice, we urge you to immediately reject 
the bids or suspend the offshore leases under Lease Sale 257 in the 
Gulf of Mexico, to stop all remaining offshore lease sales planned in 
the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, and to issue a new five-year offshore 
lease plan that includes no new leases after the current five-year plan 
expires this year.
    As environmental organizations and activists that represent 
millions of members across the United States, including communities in 
Gulf states that have been impacted by climate and environmental 
disasters as a result of offshore drilling, we are shocked by this 
administration's decision to sell 80 million acres of public waters to 
ExxonMobil, BP, and other polluters less than a week after COP26. 
Burning the oil and gas that the Department of the Interior projected 
to be developed as a result of Lease Sale 257 would be the equivalent 
of building 130 new coal-powered plants. As such, building even one new 
oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico will deepen the climate crisis, 
disproportionately imperiling low-income communities and communities of 
color in the process.
    We are also concerned that the administration has not been 
forthcoming with the public about its reasons for moving forward with 
Lease Sale 257. We have learned that the administration acknowledged in 
its own court filings that the U.S. District Court for the Western 
District of Louisiana (WDLA) had not compelled the Department of the 
Interior (Interior) to move forward with the sale within a specific 
timeframe, as recently reported by The Guardian.
    As commander-in-chief, it is imperative that you defend the 
nation's interests from the continued fossil fuel extraction driving 
the climate emergency by taking the following actions:
1. Follow Federal Law to Stop Lease Sale 257 and Remaining 2022 
        Offshore Lease Sales
    We urge you, first and foremost, to reject the bids or suspend the 
leases under Lease Sale 257 and to correct the Trump administration's 
flawed National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) analysis that was 
used to justify the sale by claiming that the sale would have no impact 
on climate change or the environment. We also urge you to cancel the 
remaining lease sales planned in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. This 
administration has repeatedly cited the WDLA ruling in June 2021 
(Louisiana et. al. v. Biden et. al.) as the basis for why the Interior 
was obligated to move forward with offshore lease sales. But in that 
ruling, the court recognizes that ``there is a huge difference between 
the discretion to stop or pause a lease sale because the land has 
become ineligible for a reason such as an environmental issue, and, 
stopping or pausing a lease sale with no such issues and only as a 
result of Executive Order 14008.'' The court's order, therefore, does 
not preclude the Interior from following federal law, including NEPA 
and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), which grant the 
Interior Secretary discretion to stop lease sales to allow for proper 
and comprehensive environmental review. We urge you to do so before new 
leases become effective.
2. Create a New Five-Year Lease Plan with No New Lease Sales
    Secondly, as you are also aware, OCSLA requires the Interior 
Secretary to create a new five-year plan for offshore lease sales after 
the current plan expires this year. In accordance with OCSLA, we urge 
you to create a new five-year lease plan that includes no new offshore 
lease sales for the next five years. Issuing a new five-year lease plan 
with no new leases will have no effect on the fossil fuel industry's 
ability to meet the nation's energy needs, nor will it affect jobs. As 
the Interior previously acknowledged in January 2021, ``the oil and gas 
industry has stockpiled millions of acres of leases on public lands and 
waters'' that remain unused and non-producing. In March 2021, White 
House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also stated that stopping these lease 
sales ``will not affect oil and gas production or jobs for years to 
come.''
    Creating a new five-year lease plan with no new leases will, 
however, give the United States critical time to combat the climate 
emergency by not adding new emissions to the crisis while we work to 
reduce existing greenhouse gases and transition to clean energy. This 
will also improve the administration's position on the world stage when 
it comes to climate action ahead of both the World Economic Forum and 
COP27 this year. Finally, it will fulfill the President's promise to 
end fossil fuel leasing.
    We are in an unprecedented crisis and need leadership from your 
administration. Just this past month, temperatures in Alaska reached 
record-high temperatures of nearly 70 degrees, and scientists now warn 
that the ``doomsday'' Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is near collapse, 
threatening to accelerate a 10-foot rise in global sea levels that 
could decimate coastal cities within the next five years. As recently 
outlined by the Department of Defense and the National Intelligence 
Council in October 2021, we must immediately reduce emissions to 
prevent the impacts of climate change on U.S. food systems, 
infrastructure, supply chains, and public health.
    The above actions would be in accordance with existing federal law 
and in compliance with the ruling issued by WDLA in Louisiana et. al. 
that struck down the pause on offshore leasing via executive order. 
These actions would also be in alignment with this administration's 
commitment to center environmental justice in all decision-making. For 
these reasons, we urge you to marshall the full authority of your 
office to cancel or suspend Lease Sale 257, stop the remaining leases 
in the current five-year offshore leasing plan, and issue a new five-
year leasing plan that includes no new lease sales.

            Sincerely,

        Andrew Hudson                 Dineen O'Rourke
        Founder                       Campaign Manager
        198 Methods                   350 PDX

        Laura Neish                   Karen Bueno
        Executive Director            Leaders Team Member
        350 Bay Area                  Accelerate Neighborhood Climate 
                                      Action

        Patricia Hine                 Erika Thi Patterson
        President                     Campaign Director
        350 Eugene                    Action Center on Race and the 
                                      Economy

        Sherry Pollack                Maayan Cohen
        Co-Founder                    National Campaigns Director
        350 Hawaii                    Action for the Climate Emergency

        Shelden Prentice              Katie Huffling
        Federal Policy Lead           Executive Director
        350 Seattle                   Alliance of Nurses for Healthy 
                                      Environments

        Daniel Villa                  Sarah Stewart
        Volunteer                     President
        350 Tacoma                    Animals Are Sentient Beings, Inc.
        Karen Bearden                 Heather Cantino
        Coordinator                   Steering Committee Chair
        350 Triangle                  Athens County's Future Action 
                                      Network

        Emily Southard                Ellen E. Barfield
        US Team Co-Coordinator        Co-Founder and Coordinator
        350.org                       Phil Berrigan Memorial Chapter, 
                                      Veterans for Peace

        Patricia Alessandrini         Mary Gutierrez
        Secretary                     Director
        Bergen County Green Party     Earth Action, Inc.

        Ted Glick                     Elizabeth Dunne
        Organizer                     Director of Legal Advocacy
        Beyond Extreme Energy         Earth Law Center

        Mark Hefflinger               Alexandria Villasenor
        Communications & Digital 
        Director                      Founder & Executive Director
        Bold Alliance                 Earth Uprising International

        Marie Venner                  Leah Redwood
        Co-Chair                      Activist
        Businesses for a Livable 
        Climate                       Extinction Rebellion San 
                                      Francisco Bay Area

        Marie Venner and Stefanie 
        Klass                         Thomas Meyer
        Co-Chairs                     National Organizing Manager
        Call to Action Colorado       Food & Water Watch

        Mark Meeks                    Julia Walsh
        Minister                      Director
        Capitol Heights 
        Presbyterian                  Frack Action

        Stefanie Klass                Patricia J. Popple
        Co-Chair                      Editor
        CatholicNetwork US            Frac Sand Sentinel: Project 
                                      Outreach

        Nikki Reisch                  Shannon Smith
        Director, Climate & Energy 
        Program                       Executive Director
        Center for International 
        Environmental Law (CIEL)      FracTracker Alliance

        Marie Venner and Jim Smith    Katharina Maier
        Co-Chairs                     Organizer
        CO Businesses for a Livable 
        Climate                       Fridays for Future U.S.

        Fred Kirsch                   Hallie Templeton
        Director                      Legal Director
        Community for Sustainable 
        Energy                        Friends of the Earth

        Irene Danysh                  Codi Norred
        Coordinator                   Executive Director
        Community Visions             Georgia Interfaith Power and 
                                      Light

        Donald Alfred Hebbard         Sara Shor
        President & Founding Member   Organizing Director
        Compressor Free Franklin      GreenFaith
        Rose Ann Witt                 Julia Jackson
        Co-Founder                    Founder
        Conejo Climate Coalition      Grounded

        Clayton Dewey                 Colette Pichon Battle
        Ecosocialist Committee 
        Chair                         Executive Director
        Denver Democratic 
        Socialists of America         Gulf Coast Center for Law and 
                                      Policy

        Manna Jo Green                Sally Jane Gellert
        Environmental Director        Member
        Hudson River Sloop 
        Clearwater                    Occupy Bergen County

        Rachel Lehman                 Courtney Vail
        Chair of Healthy 
        Communities                   Campaign Director
        I-70 Citizens Advisory 
        Group                         Oceanic Preservation Society

        August Allen                  Emily Martin
        Executive Director            National Policy & Programs Mgr.
        In the Shadow of the Wolf     Our Climate

        Dallas Goldtooth              Paco Fabian
        Campaigner                    Communications & Campaigns Dir.
        Indigenous Environmental 
        Network                       Our Revolution

        Philip Beck                   Michael Helms
        Co-Founder                    Senior Advisor, Government 
                                      Affairs
        Indivisible Ambassadors       Oxfam America

        Elizabeta Stacishin           Ayisha Siddiqa
        Climate Envoy                 Co-Founder
        Indivisible Colorado          Polluters Out

        Basav Sen                     Cheryl Barnds and Marie Venner
        Climate Policy Director       Co-Chair & Founder
        Institute for Policy 
        Studies Climate Policy 
        Program                       RapidShift Network

        Mark J. Palmer                Dorothy Slater
        Associate Director            Senior Climate Researcher
        Intl. Marine Mammal Project 
        of Earth Island Institute     Revolving Door Project

        Amy Petre Hill                Jeff Hart
        Founder & Community 
        Chaplain                      Co-Founder
        Mental Health and Inclusion 
        Ministries                    Save EPA

        Emmett Hobley                 Marie Venner
        Co-Chair                      Chair
        Montbello Neighborhood 
        Improvement Association       Small Business Alliance

        Naeema Muhammad               Jennifer Nielsen
        Organizing Co-Director        Climate Co-Chair
        NC Environmental Justice 
        Network                       SOMA Action

        Anni Hanna                    Matt Krogh
        Director                      U.S. Oil & Gas Campaign Director
        New Mexico Climate Justice    Stand.earth
        Jerry Rivers                  Susan Van Dolsen
        Environmental Scientist       Co-Founder
        North American Climate, 
        Conservation and 
        Environment                   Stop the Algonquin Pipeline 
                                      Expansion

        Kristi Douglas                Lauren Naunus
        Commerce City Coun. & Co-
        Chair                         Advocacy Director
        North Range Concerned 
        Citizens                      Sunrise Movement

        Maura Stephens                Paddy McClelland
        Coordinating Committee 
        Member                        Co-Founder
        System Change Not Climate 
        Change                        Wall of Women

        Timothy Edward Duda           Rachel Dawn Davis
        Founder                       Public Policy & Justice Organizer
        Terra Advocati                Waterspirit

        Zack Burley                   Chris Calwell
        Policy Associate              Co-Chair
        The Climate Mobilization      Western Slope Businesses for a 
                                      Livable Climate

        Harmony Commings              Osprey Orielle Lake
        Co-Founder                    Executive Director
        The Green House Connection 
        Center                        Women's Earth and Climate Action 
                                      Network

        Fran Aguirre and Deb James    Renee M. Canon
        Co-President                  Executive Director & Co-Founder
        Unite North Metro Denver      Womxn from the Mountain

                                 ______
                                 

                               Our Children's Trust
                                               Eugene, OR  

                                                   February 3, 2022

Hon. Alan S. Lowenthal, Chairman
Hon. Pete Stauber, Ranking Member
House of Representatives
Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources
Washington, DC

Re: Materials for January 20, 2022 Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral 
        Resources Hearing on What More Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas 
        Leasing Means for Achieving U.S. Climate Targets

    Dear Chairman Lowenthal and Ranking Member Stauber:

    On behalf of Our Children's Trust (``OCT''), a nonprofit law firm 
dedicated to securing the legal right to a safe climate system for 
youth and future generations, please find enclosed herewith materials 
for your consideration relevant to the January 20, 2022 Subcommittee on 
Energy and Mineral Resources Hearing on ``What More Gulf of Mexico Oil 
and Gas Leasing Means for Achieving U.S. Climate Targets.'' This 
submission is designed to emphasize the detrimental effects of the U.S. 
Department of the Interior's (``DOI'') Interim Report on the Federal 
Oil and Gas Program on youth and future generations of Americans. We 
also hope to inspire you with the stories of courageous children and 
provide resources critical to developing science-based, technically and 
economically feasible solutions to the climate crisis that serve as 
alternatives to the years of devastation wrought by the Federal Oil and 
Gas Program.

    Through youth-led constitutional legal actions, including Juliana 
v. United States (``Juliana''), the landmark federal constitutional 
climate case filed by twenty-one youth plaintiffs, including eleven 
Black, Brown and Indigenous youth, described in Exhibit A, OCT supports 
youth seeking to hold their governments accountable for policies and 
actions that have caused, and continue to cause, the climate crisis. 
Through these actions, youth seek science-based remedies to reduce 
greenhouse gas emissions at rates necessary to protect their 
fundamental human rights.

    It is OCT's understanding that the materials submitted for the 
January 20th hearing will inform the Committee's outlook on how to best 
shape future climate policy and legislation pertaining to DOI's report 
of the Federal Oil and Gas Program and related concerns. The U.S. 
government has long known of the dangers of climate change and can no 
longer act in a manner that ignores that a climate emergency exists. If 
DOI, as trustee of public trust resources, does not take immediate 
effective action to cease permitting activities that increase the 
Earth's energy imbalance (described below), our children, future 
generations, and innumerable species will continue to suffer greater 
injury with long-lasting and potentially irreversible consequences. 
Continued federal leasing without an adequate assessment of the effects 
on our Nation's children and implementation of a national plan to 
protect the atmosphere in trust for present and future generations 
would be a gross violation of the Constitution and DOI's public trust 
responsibilities. Given our mission as the Nation's only law firm 
dedicated to representing youth whose constitutional rights are being 
infringed by their government's conduct that causes climate change, OCT 
has a substantial interest in ensuring that any such legislation, 
policies, or programs are consistent with what the best available 
science dictates is necessary to stabilize the climate system and 
protect the fundamental rights of youth and future generations.

    We invite you to consult the materials enclosed herewith, which 
demonstrate that climate change is already harming the fundamental 
rights of young people in the United States and legislation, policies 
and programs which ensure emissions reductions and sequestration of 
excess CO2 is necessary for the protection of the 
fundamental rights of American children (Note: Carbon removed through 
natural sequestration in sinks must be counted separately and used to 
draw down the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere from 
cumulative U.S. historic emissions, not to provide a negative credit or 
offset for ongoing and new U.S. emissions.).

    There is simply no scientific basis to continue historical rates of 
extraction in light of the already-dangerous accumulations of 
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to date and readily available and 
cost-effective renewable energy sources. Enclosed as Exhibit B are 
comments OCT submitted April 15, 2021 on DOI's Interim Report on the 
Federal Oil and Gas Program. As part of its fiduciary duties as trustee 
to manage and protect our country's vital natural resources, DOI has 
the duty of loyalty to administer the trust solely in the interest of 
the trust beneficiaries--both present and future generations of 
citizens--and that can only be done by recognizing and applying the 
best available science as to how to restore Earth's energy imbalance. 
With the current atmospheric CO2 concentration over 415 ppm, 
the atmosphere has already been substantially impaired--as Dr. Michael 
Kuperberg, former director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program 
has stated, we are in the ``danger zone.'' How can we achieve global 
climate stability if DOI continues to authorize more emissions through 
its oil and gas leasing program? You must be able to answer that 
question and your answer should guide your conduct going forward. All 
analyses of the potential and historical impact of GHG emissions from 
changes in the Federal Oil and Gas Program must be evaluated in terms 
of whether the emissions are in line with the U.S. government's public 
trust and constitutional obligation to reduce emissions to below 350 
ppm by 2100. Anything less than this scientifically supported 
trajectory will irreparably harm the environment on which our children 
rely for their life, liberty, and property and which our posterity are 
entitled to inherit.

    Enclosed as Exhibit C you will find a document entitled 
``Government Climate and Energy Policies Must Target <350 ppm 
Atmospheric CO2 by 2100 to Protect Children and Future 
Generations.'' This document details the scientific basis underlying, 
and prescription for, stabilization of the climate system as necessary 
to protect the fundamental human rights of youth and future generations 
relative to the climate crisis and explains the scientific conclusion 
that allowing warming of up to 1.5+C is not safe, as the IPCC has also 
acknowledged.

    Climate legislation, policy, and programs which ensure emissions 
reductions and sequestration of excess CO2 consistent with 
what the best available science dictates is necessary for the 
protection of the fundamental rights of young people and future 
generations. The information in these Exhibits are additionally 
relevant to the House of Representatives' concurrent resolution, 
Children's Fundamental Rights and Climate Recovery (H.Con.Res.31), 
sponsored by Representative Schakowsky, supporting the Juliana youth 
plaintiffs. It recognizes the disproportionate effects of the climate 
crisis on children and their fundamental rights which demands renewed 
U.S. leadership and development of a national, science-based climate 
recovery plan. This resolution, re-introduced on Earth Day 2021, had 
the support of 64 members from both chambers.

    Should you have any questions regarding the enclosed materials, 
please feel free to contact Liz Lee, OCT's government affairs staff 
attorney at [email protected].

            Sincerely,

                                             Andrea Rodgers
                                         Senior Litigation Attorney

Enclosures:

Exhibit A: Juliana v. United States Summary and Plaintiffs' Profiles

Exhibit B: Our Children's Trust's Comments on U.S. Department of the 
Interior's Interim Report on the Federal Oil and Gas Program (April 15, 
2021)

Exhibit C: Government Climate and Energy Policies Must Target <350 ppm 
Atmospheric CO2 by 2100 to Protect Children and Future 
Generations (March 2021)

                                  ***

[The Exhibits can be viewed on the Committee Repository at: https://
docs.house.gov/meetings/II/II06/20220120/114338/HHRG-117-II06-20220120-
SD011.pdf]

                                 [all]