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Biden to halt new oil drilling permits on public lands

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President Joe Biden is expected to announce an executive order Wednesday suspending new oil and gas leasing on federal land, The Wall Street Journal reports.

This follows Biden’s 60-day suspension of new drilling permits for U.S. lands and waters announced last week.

During his campaign, Biden pledged to halt new drilling on federal lands and waters and end the leasing of publicly owned energy reserves as part of his plan to address climate change and transition to renewable energy.

Biden is set to suspend new drilling permits to oil companies for wells on federal land indefinitely while the Department of the Interior conducts a review of oil development’s impact on climate change, according to The Journal. While federal land accounts for roughly 9% of onshore U.S. oil production, Biden’s order will have a large impact on states such as New Mexico and Utah where the federal government controls about a third of the state.

The Biden administration has been working quickly to reverse the policies set in place by the Trump administration.

On Biden’s first day in office, he revoked the permit for construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, eliminating over 1,000 jobs.

According to the Keystone XL website, the pipeline project would employ more than 11,000 Americans, including more than 7,000 union workers, in 2021 and generate $1.6 billion in gross wages.

“The early actions of the administration are unilaterally shutting down and restricting the ability of American oil and gas producers to run their operations,” said Anne Bradbury, chief executive of the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents independent U.S. oil companies. “The scope and the lack of consultation with industry stakeholders has been alarming.”

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said “[Biden’s] radical Green New Deal-inspired agenda” will destroy American jobs.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said Biden’s energy policies will cause “$5 a gallon at the pump and higher home energy bills.”

Follow Annaliese Levy on Twitter @AnnalieseLevy

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Economy

Report: Border crisis has ‘completely upended’ Census Bureau’s population stats

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According to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released on Thursday, immigration into the U.S. has risen so rapidly that it beat out federal projections “by decades.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation explains of the report that the total number of immigrants in the U.S. rose to a record high of 51.4 million as of February 2024, representing 15.5% of the total population, according to CIS.

The U.S. Census Bureau published projections in November which estimated that the share of foreign-born nationals in the U.S. would not reach 15.5% until at least 2039, making the projections “obsolete,” CIS authors Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler wrote.

The 15.5% includes both immigrants who are in the U.S. legally and those who are undocumented or are in the country illegally, according to a CIS review of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Illegal migrants account for roughly 25% of the 51.4 million total number of foreign nationals currently living in the U.S., the other 75% being in the country legally.

“The enormous scale of immigration over the past three years has implications for nearly every aspect of American society, including public coffers, the labor market, schools, hospitals, and the balance of political power, to say nothing of whether we can assimilate this many people,” Camarota and Zeigler wrote in the study.

“This increase over just 38 months (since President Joe Biden took office) is unprecedented,” Camarota and Zeigler wrote. “Looking at each presidency shows that growth since the start of the Biden administration is dramatically higher than the increase during Trump’s or Obama’s time in office.”

The Daily Caller reports on specific numbers of illegal immigration:

The number of U.S.-based immigrants grew by 6.4 million under the Bidenadministration alone, according to CIS. It is estimated more than half of the 6.4 million are illegal immigrants, which is larger than the individual population sizes of 33 different states…

…Roughly 2 million migrant encounters were recorded at the southern border in fiscal year 2023, compared to approximately 1.7 million in fiscal year 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection. Migrant apprehensions at the southern border never crossed more than 1 million under the former Trump administration.

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