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Yesterday, the Biden administration announced steps to bolster the deployment of renewable energy on public lands and waters and clean up the electric grid. Central to the new effort is an interagency memorandum of understanding to prioritize reviews of renewable energy proposals on public lands, with the goal of permitting 25 gigawatts of renewable projects on public lands by 2025. The new collaboration includes the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, and the EPA. As part of the new initiative, the Interior Department is developing plans for new Renewable Energy Coordination Offices (RECOs) that will work with the Bureau of Land Management on clean energy.
Offshore, plans for a record-breaking wind energy lease sale moved forward, with the most leases ever offered off the coasts of New York and New Jersey. Throughout the year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management plans to keep momentum going on proposals to bring wind farms to areas off the Gulf Coast, California, Oregon, and central Atlantic.
Additional renewable energy efforts announced include $20 billion in grid funding from the Department of Energy to improve the grid, and a Department of Agriculture pilot program to support clean energy in underserved rural communities—among many others.
Yesterday's announcements build on a highly-productive year for the Biden administration on renewable energy efforts, even as the administration has had an inconsistent and contradictory approach to oil and gas production on public lands. Last year the administration offered oil companies the rights to 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, starting the timer on a “carbon bomb.”
The administration's actions come at a time when America desperately needs to cut its carbon emissions in order to slow the accelerating climate crisis. Recent reporting found that extreme weather and climate disasters last year cost the country at least $145 billion.
Katie Worth on how big oil is influencing public education
From buying off experts to luring in underpaid teachers with promises of classroom supplies, Big Oil and Big Coal are waging a successful war on accurate science education and setting the U.S. up to fail in its fight against climate change.
In the latest episode of The Landscape, award-winning investigative journalist Katie Worth joins CWP to talk about the issue, which is the topic of her new book, Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America. The book, which came out in November 2021, pulls the curtain back on the many ways the fossil fuel industry is sowing doubt about climate change in America’s classrooms, despite the global scientific consensus that human-causing climate change is real and getting worse.
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In 2022 and beyond, let's all commit to preserving and protecting our public lands, not only for ourselves, but so generations who follow can go to the mountain and return with lessons that will guide them."
