ICYMI: Chair Grijalva Blasts Fossil Fuel Industry for Shameless Propaganda Following Putin’s Violent Attack on Ukraine

Washington, D.C. – Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) today published an opinion piece in The Guardian sharply criticizing the fossil fuel industry for its blatant opportunism following Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic, deadly invasion of Ukraine. Mere days after the attack, industry rhetoric advocating for more oil and gas leasing and drilling on U.S. public lands and waters soon inundated social media and opinion pieces under the false pretenses of asserting “energy independence.”

“Our top priority must be ending Putin’s hostilities, but as chair of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources, I feel duty-bound to set the record straight,” Grijalva stated in the piece. “We can’t let the fossil-fuel industry scare us into a domestic drilling free-for-all that is neither economically warranted nor environmentally sound…. The U.S. is the world’s top oil and gas producer. Doubling down on fossil fuels is a false solution that only perpetuates the problems that got us here in the first place.”

Grijalva’s op-ed lays out several statistics from the U.S. Department of the Interior and other government sources that rebut the fossil fuel industry’s most frequently used arguments for opening more public lands and waters to oil and gas development:

• On public lands, the fossil fuel industry already controls at least 26 million acres and is sitting on more than 9,000 approved, but unused permits.
• Offshore, the fossil fuel industry is not yet producing oil from nearly 75% of its active federal oil and gas leases, which cover more than 8 million acres.
• President Biden has not hindered oil and gas development; despite significant opposition, the current administration has actually approved more U.S. drilling permits per month in 2021 than the first three years of the previous administration.
• American gas prices will not be affected by the administration approving new oil and gas leases. Oil is a volatile global commodity; the price is affected by worldwide supply, demand, and world events, like war.
• Giving new leases to oil and gas companies now will take years, if not decades, to develop and will only marginally increase total U.S. production.
• The vast majority of onshore U.S. oil and gas resources are located on state and private lands, not federally managed public lands.

In his piece, Grijalva proposes a more sustainable, economical solution to decreasing global reliance on fossil fuel oligarchies like Russia—robust investments in clean, renewable energy. Increasing clean energy production is especially crucial in light of this week’s damning report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“If we fail to enact major mitigation efforts, like curbing fossil-fuel development, both quickly and substantially, we will ‘miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.’ …We must wean ourselves off our oil and gas dependence and make transformational investments in cleaner renewable energy technologies, like those in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Build Back Better Act and the Competes Act, and we must do it now.”

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Media Contact: Lindsay Gressard

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