![](\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/media-library\/natural-gas-flares-from-an-offshore-oil-drilling-rig-in-cook-inlet-off-the-coast-of-alaska.jpg?id=32489458&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C106%2C0%2C107\"\/)
Environmentalists in Alaska and beyond pointed to the oil and gas industry's lack of interest in a Friday lease sale for nearly a million acres of seafloor as the latest evidence that the U.S. must move beyond fossil fuels and protect the Cook Inlet.<\/p>
The U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced that Hilcorp Alaska LLC submitted the sole bid, offering $63,983 for one of the 93 available blocks. That lease may be granted after a 90-day review process.<\/p>
\"The result should stiffen Interior's spine to stop leasing our public lands for fossil fuel and instead align their management with the urgent need to combat climate change.\"<\/p>
The Interior Department had initially canceled the lease sale in May, citing lack of industry interest, but was ultimately required<\/a> to hold it before the end of the year by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which President Joe Biden signed into law in August.<\/p> While the IRA included about $369 billion in \"energy security and climate change\" investments, campaigners had blasted<\/a> concessions including the lease sale requirement, with Siqiniq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign I\u00f1upiat for a Living Arctic, saying at the time: \"This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it. This is a life-or-death situation and the longer we act as though the world isn't on fire around us, the worse our burns will be. Biden has the power to prevent this, to mitigate the damage.\"<\/p>\n