A supply ship sits anchored next to the Chevron Corp. Jack/St. Malo deep water oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in the aerial photograph taken off the coast of Louisiana, U.S., on Friday, May 18, 2018. Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Irony is not always funny:

The Biden administration sold oil and gas leases days after the climate summit

Days after President Joe Biden told world leaders that his administration is committed to slowing climate change with “action, and not words,” his Interior Department oversaw one of the largest oil and gas lease sales in American history.

Eighty million acres of the Gulf of Mexico — an area twice the size of Florida — was put on the auction block on Wednesday. Energy companies, led by Exxon Mobil Corp., only placed bids on a total of 1.7 million acres, and it’s unclear how much of that will later be developed.

Environmentalists decried the lease auction. “This is an administration that campaigned on dealing with climate change,” said Drew Caputo, an attorney at Earthjustice, which sued to stop the sale. “That’s why this lease sale is so disappointing, because it is the most significant action that the administration will have taken on oil and gas development and it goes in the wrong direction.”

The Biden administration argues that it didn’t have much of an option. Shortly after taking office, Biden announced a temporary pause on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters, pending a review of their impact on the worsening climate crisis. Roughly a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuel extraction from public lands.

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