Last week, a federal judge canceled more than 80 million acres of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
According to the court, the Biden administration did not sufficiently take so-called climate change into account when it auctioned the leases late last year.
The cancellation will profoundly impact Alabama’s economy, given that the state collects revenue from the oil and gas produced from those leases.
During an interview with Mobile radio FM Talk 106.5’s “The Jeff Poor Show,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn) explained how the cancellation compounds problems created by the Biden administration, adding the decisions were a product of an effort to respond to climate change.
“It’s going to have a big impact, and there’s been a war on oil ever since Biden got in on the 20th of January, last year,” Tuberville said. “Prices have gone sky-high. It impacts everything that we do in this country. We could be energy independent as we were under Trump. We could be exporting oil, making money. But Biden has done just the opposite, closed our pipelines down. Now he is closing down 80 million acres of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. And the State of Alabama gets residuals off that gas and oil that comes out of the ground. So, not just us but Louisiana and Texas. To me, it is just absolutely amazing how this guy can come in and, in one year, pretty much single-handedly on just the decisions he has made destroyed our energy supply. It can’t continue. If it does, it is going to put us in not just trouble in terms of economics, Jeff — it is going to hurt us with national security.”
“You know this Ukraine deal, Jeff — it’s all about oil,” he added. “It’s all about oil and gas coming from the pipelines in NORD Stream 2 to Germany. Germany is in NATO with us. They’re supposed to be a close ally, but under President Trump, they let this go through. President Trump fought it every day. And now, President Biden has allowed this pipeline to continue to run. He changed President Trump’s orders. So that has put us in a bind with Russia making money and us losing money. It’s a sad state of affairs. Just totally opposite of any Republican decision that has ever been made about oil and gas. But they’re all about climate change. They’re about some things sometimes. You can’t figure it out. And we’re all about saving our country and the world. But when you’re destroying it in other fashions, purposefully, then something has got to be done.”
