Joe Biden: Number one, no more subsidies for fossil fuel industry, no more drilling on federal lands.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. President Joe Biden campaigned on a plan of climate action and environmental justice, promising to put the nation back on track to curb greenhouse gas emissions after years of climate change denial during the Trump administration.

Joe Biden: No more drilling, including offshore, no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, hence, number one.

Melissa Harris-Perry: According to the Bureau of Land Management, as of 2018, about 4% of public land was being leased to oil and gas companies. That's generated nearly $3 billion for the federal government and states. As we've discussed in the past here on The Takeaway, drilling on these lands often threatens indigenous cultural sites and oil pipelines can contaminate crucial water sources. Also, low-income communities in various parts of the country are polluted by nearby refineries. In January 2021, President Biden took action to fulfill his campaign promise.

Joe Biden: Today's executive order also directs the Secretary of Interior to stop issuing new oil and gas leases on public lands and offshore waters wherever possible.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just a few months later, in June 2021, a federal judge blocked the President's temporary ban and the Biden administration allowed drilling to resume, also promised to continue working towards, "a just and equitable energy future." By January of this year, President Biden seemed to have reversed course, now issuing more permits than even the Trump administration.

A recent report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns it to fend off the worst of climate catastrophes, countries across the globe must reduce carbon emissions by 43%. That's a pace far exceeding current efforts. Last month, just days after the release of that report, the Biden administration decided to move forward with a plan to lease more federal land to oil and gas companies. The administration is framing this decision as a response to the dramatic rise in gas prices associated with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. For climate activists, see the decision as a broken promise

Nick Estes: Deb Holland, first Indigenous woman to sit at a cabinet-level position in this country, went in and said very stridently that she was going to stop oil and gas leasing on federal lands.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's Professor Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, and author of Our History Is the Future. I spoke with Nick last month after the Biden administration announced its plan to allow more drilling.

Nick Estes: We see somebody like Deb Holland, who was at the Standing Rock camps, going back on her word, and that, to me, is a very dire sign and it shows the limitations of that kind of politics. It's not to say that it's hopeless, but what elites consider hard political choices are at the end of the day, questions of existential importance to the rest of the planet.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This week, I talked with Zoya Teirstein, a staff writer at Grist, where she covers climate and energy policy.

Zoya Teirstein: What you've seen here is a classic political flip flop, and there's a very poignant reason for that. The war in Ukraine has basically upended energy policy across the globe. In the US, gas prices are on the rise and so President Biden is in a sticky situation where he wants to stick to his climate goals and also reduce gas prices for Americans.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Certainly, gas prices begin to rise with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is a gamesmanship happening in price setting. This isn't actually about, oh, there's not enough.

Zoya Teirstein: Well, yes. There's elements to this. For example, this isn't the only thing Biden has done to try and reduce oil and gas prices and price of the pump in the short term. He's basically issuing a million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves nationally. He also lifted a moratorium on ethanol-blended gasoline for the summertime, and now this oil and gas decision.

Except for maybe the strategic reserves, the ethanol, and the oil and gas leasing, that's just a political play because, for example, the oil and gas leases will not produce oil or gas for at least a year. It takes a while to drill that stuff up and get it out on the market. I don't think any of this is really about reducing oil and gas prices in the short term, it's more about showing Americans that he's doing everything he can to reduce prices.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Presumably, this is because gas prices affect how and if people vote.

Zoya Teirstein: Gas prices, historically, have been a great indicator of whether the incumbent party prevails in the midterm elections and so reducing gas prices and inflation are really crucial for Biden, in order to ensure that his party retains majorities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Does policy and particularly something like energy policy, does it really influence a midterm election vote? Given what we know about midterms and the surge in decline, the likelihood of needing to simply get your own party loyals out to vote. Is there any sort of independence sitting somewhere in Kansas is like, "You know what? I'm totally going to go cast my vote for the Democratic congressional candidate now because Joe Biden opened up drilling."

Zoya Teirstein: Well, I don't think that that independent is going to notice perhaps that Biden opened up federal lands for oil and gas drilling, per see, but what they will notice is whether gas is $5 a gallon or $3 a gallon. That is a price point that's staring them right in the face every time they take a drive, and so that does have an effect. That, historically, has been shown to have an effect, the way that gas prices influence elections is pretty well documented.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Does it have an effect for Democratic voters and their likelihood of supporting democratic candidates if they feel like their president has gone back on a campaign promise?

Zoya Teirstein: I'm not sure we can say yet. I know that there's a faction of the Democratic Party, progressives, namely, who are very upset with Biden's move. It's not just the oil and gas leasing, it's a lot more. Biden came into office with this ambitious plan, a new deal-esque proposal to inject tons of money into the economy, tackle climate change, do a whole bunch of stuff and he split that agenda into two pieces.

The first half of that was the infrastructure bill, which passed last fall, and the second half of that is called the Build Back Better Act, which we've heard a lot about and that's stalled out in the Senate, so that entire plank of his agenda went away, basically overnight because of one Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia.

Biden hasn't been able to deliver on that second half of his promise, and I think that that, more than perhaps gas prices or the specific decision on oil and gas leasing, is going to be a big issue for Democrats going into the midterms and basically, the way that Democrats see Biden. I think that Biden still needs to deliver that second half of his proposal somehow and if not, then that, then he's going to suffer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In your reporting, you do talk about how opening this federal land drilling won't necessarily work to bring down gas prices for Americans in the short term. You just walked us through that with how long it takes between opening up the drilling opportunities versus, it actually producing oil and gas and actually showing up as at the pump, so again, being able to make this claim towards, "Well, I'm doing everything," versus what people will actually be feeling, is it enough to make those electoral impacts?

Zoya Teirstein: When I talk to a former Clinton adviser on climate, he basically said that this is all that Biden can do. He's checked, basically, every box at his disposal. He did the ethanol, he did the release from the reserves, and then he did the oil and gas leasing, and that's basically all he has. There's not much more he can really do from the presidential office to reduce gas prices. There's the war, there's all kinds of other global issues that influence oil and gas production. He's done what he can for now and it remains to be seen whether that will be enough to influence voters in the midterms.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, let's go a bit beyond the question of midterms to the existential threat to humanity. Let's talk about the other part of this kind of public policy. How big a difference does this make and again, the overall question of human contributed, human-created climate change?

Zoya Teirstein: Basically, what you see here, and this is another reason why this oil and gas leasing a decision, it seems to be mainly political, is because he's opening up a very small fraction of public land for oil and gas drilling. It's roughly 144,000 acres. He also raised the royalty rates on that. In addition to that, he's only letting those leases occur in places where existing infrastructure already exists, basically, so in states like Alabama, New Mexico, Wyoming.

It's not really about generating a massive amount of oil and gas when these public lands, which would, in fact, contribute to this overarching crisis, which is the climate crisis, but still, experts say and there's been a recent report on this from the UN, that any more extraction of fossil fuels Is basically a death sentence for the planet that everything that's in the ground right now has to stay in the ground. From a client perspective, a president who came into office with this ambitious client plan, who hasn't been able to achieve it basically at all and is now opening up new federal land for oil and gas drilling. It doesn't look good.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've had conversations about the ways that this kind of oil and gas drilling has disproportionate impact on Indigenous cultural sites and on reservation land. Can you talk to us a bit about the pipelines, the sites, and perhaps the particular effects for Indigenous peoples?

Zoya Teirstein: A lot of oil and gas development has historically impacted tribes, people of color, frontline communities that are clustered around those projects. It's no accident that a lot of oil and gas development extraction happens in poor Black Indigenous communities. That's because the effects of that pollution are felt by those communities pretty immediately. I don't want to say that all on the Indigenous front, not all tribes in the US are opposed necessarily to oil and gas drilling.

Some tribes have their own oil extraction and coal extraction efforts underway. By and large, Indigenous communities are opposed to new gas and oil infrastructure and you can see that around the pipeline fights that happen. That's one element where Biden has stuck to his promise. He has not sought to revive the Keystone XL Pipeline. His administration is still working to block the Dakota Access Pipeline. In that sense, he has stuck to his campaign promise but I think that if this is a sampling of what the president might expand upon, if he's trying to open up way more land for oil and gas, that could materially impact people's lives in a negative way.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If President Biden has done all of this to look like he's reducing gas prices and Democrats still have a bad showing in the midterms, that at least release some of the pressure the president is feeling about gas prices and allow him to get the climate agenda back on track.

Zoya Teirstein: I think the opposite will likely occur and here's why. If Republicans take back the house and or the Senate, the possibility of ambitious climate action passing are extremely low. Republicans have not shown an appetite for that. Basically, Democrats have this one shot to pass climate action now before the midterms. The clock is really ticking because once the midterms happen, Republicans are, as I said, favor take back one or more houses of Congress.

Then federal climate strategy goes out the window. That's why Biden is playing this four-dimensional game of chess because in his mind and this is something that an expert told me who's close to the negotiations. Perhaps Biden is hoping that, by showing Americans and the Senate that he has done everything he can to reduce oil and gas prices in the short term, they may turn to the much more difficult task of actually passing his climate agenda.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Zoya Teirstein is a staff writer at Grist. Thanks so much for joining us, Zoya.

Zoya Teirstein: Thanks, Melissa.

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