|
The Center for Western Priorities released a new tracker keeping tabs on Trump administration handouts to the oil and gas industry since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. After a decade of racking up immense debt and rarely turning a profit, oil and gas corporations were briefly hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic and a global oil glut. Now, oil prices have rebounded, but the Interior Department is bending over backwards to continue bailing out the industry—lowering royalty rates and granting lease suspensions, sidestepping their responsibility to provide taxpayers a fair return for publicly-owned oil and gas.
The new tracker finds that the Interior Department has so far granted 114 royalty reductions and 359 lease suspensions to oil and gas corporations, while denying very few requests. Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Jesse Prentice-Dunn said, "Handouts to Big Oil during this pandemic make it clear that there is no end to the lengths this administration will go to give oil companies what they want.”
The new tracker will be updated weekly with the latest information available on oil and gas royalty relief and lease suspensions as reported by the Interior Department in federal databases.
Great American Outdoors Act headed to senate floor for debate next week
The United States Senate filed cloture on the Great American Outdoors Act on Wednesday, advancing the bipartisan legislation that would provide permanent funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and direct billions toward addressing the national parks maintenance backlog. Senators took a vote in the early hours of Friday morning to keep the legislation moving toward debate by the senate next week.
|
Frontline communities are under attack from multiple emergencies happening at the same time. Black communities are dealing with the systemic racism that has infected the policing in our communities that is literally choking us to death. The rolling back of environmental rules and regulations has us gasping for air due to the cumulative public health impacts from the burning of fossil fuels in our communities.”
