The Biden administration auctioned off an area of the Gulf of Mexico the size of Italy last week for oil drilling – further damaging Biden’s credibility as an environmental warrior. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The Biden administration auctioned off an area of the Gulf of Mexico the size of Italy last week for oil drilling, further damaging Biden’s credibility on the environment. You heard him just like I did. We’ve talked about it a couple how proud we were. Do you remember how proud we were? God, we gotta elect this guy. He’s talking about how important it is that we stop drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and we don’t drill in Alaska. He’s one of us. What the hell? Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This, the size of Italy out of the Gulf of Mexico, which is a lot of the Gulf of Mexico, by the way, for anybody that doesn’t understand the size of it,
Mike Papantonio: It’s most of it, it’s most of the Gulf of Mexico.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We’re talking about the same kind of deep water drilling that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Mike Papantonio: The we handled, we handled that disaster. Real ugly disaster.
Farron Cousins: And this is a free for all and the worst part is $300 million is what they got. That is what the federal government got from these oil companies who are going to make hundreds of billions of dollars from it. And we’re selling it for $300 million. Elon Musk could have just bought the Gulf of Mexico for cheaper and not polluted it if he wanted to or any billionaire out there. But we’re killing us. We’re killing ourselves. We still see this massive dead zone that is getting bigger every year in the Gulf. We’re still dealing with the wildlife that has not fully returned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And Biden is sitting there saying that, no, we have to do it because even though we don’t want to, if we didn’t do it, they’d sue us and they’d win. So we’re just gonna not even fight. That is their reasoning.
Mike Papantonio: Well, as you know, this law firm headed up the Deepwater Horizon case. That was our case that we handled, led the litigation, led the discovery, did it across the board. And as this thing, as we were watching it develop, we’re watching these cozy relationships with Washington. And I don’t care who the president was, Democrat, Republican, it didn’t make any difference. They had so much money to spread around. And that’s what’s happening here. But I think the most troubling thing is when Biden came up, I remember us doing a show saying, God, finally somebody who gets it, that we have to push the envelope on this. We, yeah, is there going to be some suffering because we’re trying to get off of fossil fuel? Of course there is. Gas prices are gonna be high. We have to adjust. Those adjustments are gonna be difficult. But what this does is this wipes out, completely utterly wipes out anything that’s been done as far as wind energy or alternative energy of any kind. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. All of the emission reductions that we would’ve seen through the infrastructure bill are undone based on this action, this action alone. That doesn’t even include the Willow Project that they have.
Mike Papantonio: The Willow in Alaska. Talk about what he did. This is right after he says, hell with Alaska, we’re going forward with the Willow Project. Right?
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And that of course has caused huge backlash with Democrats. Even some of the more, you know, vote blue, no matter who people that I’ve seen.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, I get so, I get so frigging tired of vote blue, no matter what. I mean, how do you do that?
Farron Cousins: Well, then those folks came out and said, this is reprehensible. So it’s good that they see, listen, sure, I guess they’re better than the Republicans. But at the same time, it’s just like with Obama, he did great things for the environment, but at the same time he’s doing horrible things behind the scenes that nobody was paying attention to that undid the leaps we made in emission reduction. I was writing about it at the time.
Mike Papantonio: It is suspension of disbelief. That’s what we see with Democrats. Suspension of disbelief. Well, he said he was gonna be our president. He said he was gonna do this, and now we look back and he lied to us. I mean, and so we just, oh, well that’s okay. He needed to get elected. That’s okay. That’s kind of the attitude. It’s just.
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: It’s dumbfounding to me.
