SANTA FE, N.M.— In the wake of public pressure, the Bureau of Land 
Management today postponed its controversial July 20 lease sale to 
auction oil and gas leases across 13,000 acres in New Mexico. Earlier 
this week citizens discovered the sale location had been changed from 
Santa Fe, N.M. to Roswell, with only oil and gas representatives 
notified. Public outcry over the abrupt location change was followed
by the BLM’s postponement of the sale to Sept. 1 to allow for more public
involvement. The sale location, however, will remain in Roswell.
 
“Postponing this lease sale is a start, but cancelling it altogether is 
really what needs to happen,” said Rebecca Sobel, senior campaigner 
with WildEarth Guardians. “The Obama administration has leased 10 
million acres. Industry holds leases that will last for decades. 
Not another acre should be leased under this controversial program.” 
 
“The Bureau of Land Management must continue to be held accountable 
to include the public in their actions with what are supposed to be 
public lands,” said Eleanor Bravo with Food & Water Watch. “We will 
no longer tolerate secret deals.”

This is not the first time BLM has cancelled or postponed lease sales 
in the face of public pressure from the “Keep It in the Ground” movement. 
Other examples include a Utah sale in November and Washington D.C. and 
Montana sales in December. Protests have now occurred at every public 
lands oil and gas lease sale since September 2015, when the movement 
called on President Obama to end all new fossil fuel leasing onpublic 
lands. 
 
“Relocating and postponing fossil fuel auctions to remote places, 
websites or later dates still doesn’t hide the dangerous disconnect 
between the administration’s climate rhetoric and its fossil fuel leasing,” 
said Taylor McKinnon with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The clock 
is ticking on the climate crisis, and each new lease makes a bad problem 
worse. It’s time for the president to shut the federal carbon pollution 
spigot for good.” 
 
Background
The American public owns nearly 650 million acres of federal public 
land and more than 1.7 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf — and  
the fossil fuels beneath them. This includes federal public land, 
which makes up about a third of the U.S. land area, and oceans like 
Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard. 
These places and the fossil fuels beneath them are held in trust for the
public by the federal government; federal fossil fuel leasing is 
administered by the Department of the Interior.
 
Over the past decade, the combustion of federal fossil fuels has resulted 
in nearly a quarter of all U.S. energy-related emissions. An 2015 report 
by EcoShift Consulting, commissioned by the Center for Biological Diversity 
and Friends of the Earth, found that remaining federal oil, gas, coal, 
oil shale and tar sands that have not been leased to industry contain 
up to 450 billion tons of potentialgreenhouse gas pollution. As of earlier 
this year, 67 million acres of federal fossil fuel were already leased to 
industry, an area more than 55 times larger than Grand Canyon National Park 
containing up to 43 billion tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution.
 
Last year Sens. Merkley (D-Ore.), Sanders (I-Vt.) and others introduced 
the Keep It In the Ground Act (S. 2238) legislation to end new federal 
fossil fuel leases and cancel non-producing federal fossil fuel leases. 
Days later President Obama canceled the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, 
saying, “Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of 
this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our 
lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the
ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution 
into the sky.”