WELCOME BACK! I hope everyone had a restful holiday away and managed to unplug from their work screens. If you did, you probably missed the major news dump from the long weekend. The Interior Department decided that Black Friday was the right time to release its much anticipated review of the federal oil and gas leasing program, and called for raising leasing rates for the first time in century. The report was long overdue, since Interior Secretary Deb Haaland first promised its release in early summer, but things seemed to get held up at the White House. The report didn’t have any major shocks and largely reflected the priorities that the administration has been pointing to for months. The 18-page report said the current leasing program fails to deliver a reasonable return for taxpayers due to low lease rates, fosters speculation and shuts out a lot of public and Indigenous participation from the process. It includes several recommendations for increasing royalties and more targeted leasing on lands that aren’t environmentally and culturally sensitive — and that have demonstrable extraction potential. It stopped short, however, of calling for a sunset on federal oil and gas leases and didn't dive into how the direct climate impacts of continuing fossil fuel extraction should impact the program. That irked a lot of environmentalists who were hoping for a heavier hand on the industry, especially after President Joe Biden called for the transition from fossil fuels both on the campaign and on the world stage at COP26. “Greenlighting more fossil fuel extraction, then pretending it’s OK by nudging up royalty rates, is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement just after the report dropped. “There’s no time left for baby steps that let the fossil-fuel industry wreak even greater havoc on the Earth.” Republicans and oil and gas supporters also blasted the report for calling to hike costs on the industry during a global energy pinch. The American Petroleum Institute said the administration's was sending contradictory messages by calling for higher leasing rates while also asking for greater output from OPEC+ to address rising domestic fuel costs. “During one of the busiest travel weeks of the year when rising costs of energy are even more apparent to Americans, the Biden Administration is sending mixed signals," Frank Macchiarola, API’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement. "Days after a public speech in which the White House said the president ‘is using every tool available to him to work to lower prices and address the lack of supply,' his Interior Department proposed to increase costs on American energy development with no clear roadmap for the future of federal leasing.” Interior's report points out, however, that the current 12.5 percent leasing rate is well below what states or private landowners receive from drillers, and that nearly 53 percent of acreage under lease to the oil and gas industry are non-producing. Meanwhile, U.S. crude oil production is up 500,000 barrels per day since Biden took office in January, according to EIA data. Read more on the report from Pro’s Ben Lefebvre and your host. NOT ALL OFFSHORE IS FOR OIL: Just two days before releasing its oil and gas review, the Interior Department approved America’s second ever commercial-scale offshore wind project in federal waters. The South Fork wind project off the coast of Rhode Island follows in the footsteps of the Vineyard Wind 1 project just south of Martha's Vineyard. The project is a joint venture between Denmark’s Ørsted and the homegrown Eversource. Wind turbines are expected to begin going up in summer 2023, Kelsey Tamborrino reports for Pros. ICYMI: THE POLITICAL CLIMATE SHIFTS: Climate change is already spawning migrations inside the U.S. and causing demographic shifts that are changing local politics — and that trend is only likely to grow. Ben looked at the changes in a handful of places across the country, from Kissimmee, Fla., where thousands of Puerto Ricans moved after Hurricane Maria devastated the island and Chico, Calif., where residents displaced by the state's wildfire landed, to Boise, Idaho, where transplanted Californians of both political parties are riling up the locals. “We’re seeing it now,” said Carlos Martín, a David M. Rubenstein fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Metro program. “It’s not a managed retreat, it's an unmanaged retreat. And any demographic change usually brings about political change.” Read more from Ben here. | 
