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Oil companies sue Biden administration for shrinking Gulf lease
Chevron, the state of Louisiana and the American Petroleum Association sued an Interior Department agency for narrowing a Gulf of Mexico lease sale to protect endangered whales.
Litigants argued that the amended lease, which removed about six million acres from the sale, would violate the text of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included a provision requiring the full lease sale in September.
Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management reduced the size of the sale with the aim of protecting the endangered Rice’s whale — only about 50 of which are left in the Gulf. About one-fifth of the Gulf’s Rice’s whale population were killed in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
“Despite Congress’ clear intention in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has announced a ‘lease sale in name only’ that removes approximately 6 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico from the sale and adds new and unjustified restrictions on oil and natural gas vessels operating in this area, ignoring all other vessel traffic,” API senior vice president and general counsel Ryan Meyers said in a statement.
Welcome to The Hill’s Energy & Environment newsletter, I’m Zack Budryk — keeping you up to speed on the policies impacting everything from oil and gas to new supply chains.
Republicans on the House Small Business Committee pressed Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Thursday for answers on proposed energy-efficiency standards for ceiling fans.
The White House said Friday that President Biden didn’t hear the question that prompted a highly criticized “no comment” when he was asked earlier this month about the rising death toll from the fires in Maui.
Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for on Maui more than two weeks after fast-moving wildfires erupted on the island, devastating portions of the area. Maui County on Thursday released a validated list of 388 names compiled by the FBI of those who have been reported missing and remain unaccounted for after the Lahaina blazes.
Rising GOP support for the U.S. taking unilateral military action in Mexico against drug cartels is increasingly rattling people on both sides of the border who worry talk of an attack is getting normalized. Read more
The first GOP debate of the 2024 presidential primary season began on Fox News this week with an unusual prompt: a clip of a low-budget country song from an artist who had no public name recognition as of three weeks ago. Read more
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