High gas prices and environmental pressure required the Biden administration to find a way to shut down drilling while blaming someone else.

The solution was simple. 

Offer oil and gas leases, something the administration had to do for legal reasons due to a court ruling anyway, but sabotage it so that no one would be interested.

First, the Biden administration shrunk the amount of available land, and then it made it as unappealing as possible.

After Biden’s takeover of BLM, (Bureau of Land Management), it’s still committed to blocking drilling, while formally appearing to authorize it.

That means the royalty rate is up to nearly 1/5th and the amount of space being covered by these leases is less than a fifth. 

The poison pill gets worse from there because, as you can guess, the Biden admin is trying to offer poor sites, when possible, that have already been extensively explored and played out. 

The game plan here is to avoid criticism by claiming to be offering drilling options even while doing everything possible to deter companies from actually pursuing these options by making them as unprofitable and unviable as possible without technically running afoul of the law.

I wrote that last month. Now a month later, the inevitable payoff arrived.

The Interior Department will not move forward with planned oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet, it announced Wednesday night. 

A spokesperson for the department confirmed the Cook Inlet lease sale would not proceed due to insufficient industry interest. Meanwhile, the planned sale of two leases, lease 259 and lease 261, in the Gulf of Mexico will not proceed due to contradictory court rulings on the leases, the spokesperson confirmed. 

Whatever excuse works, right?

Biden now gets to blame a lack of interest from the industry, after creating the conditions meant to produce that outcome. Meanwhile, the media will fact check Republican critics by falsely repeating White House talking points that Biden made drilling available, but that there was no interest. Not his fault, right?