After a pause caused by a February court directive, the Biden Administration will begin selling new fossil fuel drilling licenses for federal lands that will charge 50% more for royalties on products extracted from those wells, CNN reports.

In February, Trump-appointed federal judge James Cain ruled that the administration could no longer use a metric which measures how much damage to the environment would be done by fossil fuels extracted from a site to determine the “social cost of carbon.”  The administration had been using the measurement to prioritize various programs as they impacted climate change.

The sale of the leases for 173 parcels covering 144,000 acres will be  80% smaller than originally planned by the administration due to Cain’s ruling.  The administration could not complete their impact assessments without the metric Cain shot down, and after consulting with Native tribes and local governments, decided to forgo leasing those lands. 

“For too long, the federal oil and gas leasing programs have prioritized the wants of extractive industries above local communities, the natural environment, the impact on our air and water, the needs of tribal nations, and, moreover, other uses of our shared public lands,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement, adding the department would “begin to reset how and what we consider to be the highest and best use of Americans’ resources.”

Environmentalists were less than thrilled with the announcement.

“The West is drying up and going up in flames. Between extreme drought, the shrinking of the Colorado River, and now urban wildfires in the winter, how much more death, destruction and devastation do we have to see before this administration takes action?” said Natasha Léger, executive director of Citizens for a Healthy Community.  “It’s time for climate leadership and to stop leasing our public lands for oil and gas development.  We need heroes to break through the political and economic inertia that has us on a collision course to inhabitability.”