Speaking at the White House Tuesday night, Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed President Biden will follow through with campaign promises to ban new fracking on federal land.
"President Biden promised to end all new oil and gas leasing on federal lands when was a candidate," a reporter asked. "Does the administration still have that commitment today? To end that lease?"
"We do and the leases will be reviewed by our team we just have only been in office for less than a day now," Psaki said.
Earlier Tuesday, Biden signed an executive order placing the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreements, despite the country reducing emissions without being in the global agreement. He also revoked permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, eliminating 11,000 jobs and destroying $2 billion in wages.
From Fox Business:
The move could happen on President-elect Joe Biden's first day in office, after the Trump administration spent four years trying to further construction of the $9 billion, 1,200-mile pipeline that would transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil daily from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.
An existing Keystone pipeline currently transports oil from Alberta to Illinois and Texas.
According to the Keystone XL website, the project, initially proposed more than a decade ago, would sustain about 11,000 U.S. jobs in 2021 – including 8,000 union jobs – and generate $1.6 billion in gross wages.
It is unclear how the Biden administration plans to address the job losses, but his $2 trillion clean energy infrastructure plan, with its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest, aims to "create millions of good-paying jobs that provide workers with the choice to join a union and bargain collectively with their employers," according to his website.
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