Joe Biden has issued more oil drilling permits than Donald Trump, despite gushing climate change promises

Joe Biden issued more oil and gas drilling permits than Donald Trump in his first year as president despite pledging to halt the practice as part of ambitious climate change goals.

When he entered the White House, Mr Biden identified climate change as one of four priorities and promised a dramatic reversal after the tenure of Mr Trump, who frequently mocked climate science.

However, federal data shows the Biden administration approved 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first year, far outpacing the Trump administration’s 12-month total of 2,658.

The yawning gulf between Mr Biden’s policies on oil, gas and coal extraction and his initial promises has threatened to throw his climate credentials into disarray.

At November’s Cop26 summit in Glasgow, the 79-year-old president called climate change “an existential threat to human existence” and pledged to cut US emissions by half over the next nine years.

Days later, the administration offered 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing and plans to offer more than 300,000 acres of public lands leases in March.

“Biden’s runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires ending new fossil fuel extraction, but Biden is racing in the opposite direction.”

Faced with a fuel shortage, rising petrol prices and increasingly likely defeat at the all-important midterm elections later this year, the White House agreed to increase oil production even as Mr Biden implored world leaders to stop burning fossil fuels.

In the Senate, meanwhile, Mr Biden has failed to persuade holdouts in his own party to vote for his landmark $1.7 trillion Build Back Better bill, which contains about $555 billion for climate provisions, including $320 billion in tax incentives for producers and purchasers of wind, solar and nuclear power, inducements intended to speed up a transition away from oil, gas and coal.

Some environmentalists speculate that the Biden administration has sought to use its executive authority sparingly, doing enough to strengthen major climate priorities but not so much as to put off moderate legislators whose votes will be needed to pass the bill.

Sources told The Washington Post that a White House review of federal coal leasing was paused to avoid alienating Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat who has a pivotal role in the evenly divided Senate and whose state of West Virginia is one of the biggest producers of coal in the country.

'We need climate action now'

The president has also been hamstrung by legislation at state-level.

In June, a federal judge in Louisiana sided with Republican attorneys general from 13 states who argued that Mr Biden lacked the legal authority to pause new oil and gas leases.

“Objectively, he over-promised and under-delivered,” Kevin Book, managing director of Washington-based research firm ClearView Energy Partners, told the New York Times.

Climate, conservation, Indigenous, environmental justice and community groups have petitioned the Biden administration to use its executive authority to phase out oil and gas production on public lands and oceans.

“Biden squandered precious time seeking climate action from a broken Congress,” added Mr McKinnon. “We need executive action now to meet the climate emergency with the urgency it demands, starting with ending the fossil fuel extraction the president controls.”