March 7, 2023 — Several environmental groups including Healthy Gulf, filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court challenging the Department of Interior’s sale of 73.3 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing.
As part of the federal government’s largest oil-and-gas lease offering in history, the Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 259 was slated to take place last year, but was delayed along with other offshore gas and oil auctions, purportedly due to “conflicting court rulings.”
In August, Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, included provisions for Gulf of Mexico oil leasing in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in an effort to lower the cost of oil for Americans.
Despite the legislation’s efforts to invest in clean energy solutions and tackle climate change threats, Lease Sale 259 is expected to produce up to 1.12 billion barrels of oil and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the next 50 years. The environmental groups argue in their lawsuit that this will contribute “substantially to greenhouse gas pollution that will exacerbate the climate crisis worldwide, undermine national and international efforts to transition to clean energy, and increase harms to Gulf communities.”