As the price of oil continues to drop, the oil and gas industry is trying everything to put their interests before COVID-19 relief. Right now, they’re positioned to gobble up giant swaths of public lands and waters on the cheap and are also pushing through massive new extraction projects while the country is reeling from COVID-19 and unable to fight back.

Here’s the background:

The oil and gas industry is actively pushing the Bureau of Land Management to allow new drilling and fracking leases near the Arches and Canyonlands national parks in Utah outside of the area’s “master leasing plan”. Allowing new oil and gas extraction to happen in Utah would advance the climate crisis, threaten the national parks, destroy treasured public lands, and put the great Colorado River at risk for contamination. One parcel the oil industry has requested is double the size of Arches national park itself!

The Department of the Interior cannot sit idly by and watch it happen. The National Environmental Policy Act says that the public must have enough time to analyze and comment on these projects in detail. This cannot adequately be done while communities closest to this potential oil and gas development and extraction are focused on paying their bills and keeping healthy. We must push the DOI to immediately suspend all current public comment periods, upcoming oil and gas lease sales, and new policy proposals for public lands and waters.

The Department of the Interior was created to serve people and give a voice to U.S. communities. Allowing the oil and gas industry to run amuck while the rest of the country is distracted by a global health and economic crisis will have deeply negative effects now and for decades to come. We must demand all oil and gas lease sales on public lands and in public waters stop immediately.