Hundreds of protesters may not have been able to stop the Gulf of Mexico lease sale but storming a meeting of executives made their message loud and clear

On 23 March, around 300 protesters in New Orleans aimed to shut down a reading of oil company bids for 44m acres (180,000 km², the size of the entire state of Missouri) in the Gulf of Mexico.

At grassy Duncan Plaza near New Orleans city hall, groups from all over the southern US gathered for a protest called New Lease on Life. “I have really bad sinuses and I hate smoke,” said 18-year-old Howard Johnson. The young activist from Biloxi had boarded a bus and rode for hours to be in New Orleans by sunrise to join dozens of other members of green coalitions, local churches and members of the Houma Indian Nation.

Zipping all around Duncan Plaza in bright green safety vests were the protest’s de facto hosts, members of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Bucket Brigade founding director Anne Rolfes had written a letter to Barack Obama, a desperate last-minute prayer, asking him to cancel this Gulf lease sale and halt drilling in the Gulf, as he had in the Arctic region and more recently in the Atlantic.

Her prayer unanswered, Rolfes promised me: “We will engage in civil disobedience at the lease sale. We’re going to try and stop the auction.”

Unfortunately for her cause, all the bids had been finalized that past Tuesday. Open public meetings had been held on the issue, but no protesters had shown up. The groups on hand at the day’s event would essentially be booing the movie as its credits rolled.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters at the New Lease for Life protest. Photograph: Picasa/Laura Borealis

Still, they stormed into the big meeting room at the Mercedes Benz Superdome, and on to the stage, chanting, “It’s not for sale get off it! This Gulf is not for profit!” into the faces of the oil representatives they outnumbered two-to-one. The chants drown out the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management [BOEM]’s regional director Mike Solatta as he attempted to speak, pretending he wasn’t flanked by 300 loud environmentalists.

Although ruining the ceremonial reading of the bids would not reverse decisions already made, they continued chanting and cheering for almost two hours, until every bid had been read.

During that time though, not many of the oil reps ever stopped smirking, or making “hippy” jokes about granola and soap. “I don’t mind the protesters,” I overheard one smirking bald white man tell more than one smirking grey-haired white man, “just don’t stand downwind of them!” Safe in their victory, snapping ironic iPhone pics, few of the reps on the floor seemed even the least bit annoyed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest BOEM is currently putting together their next five-year plan for drilling sites. Photograph: Picasa/Laura Borealis

Over the continuous din, I struck up some not insubstantial conversations with several of the oil reps, all of whom wanted nothing to do with appearing in my article. They chuckled at all the protest signs decrying fracking: “Do they realize fracking takes place on land?” One told me he’d attended oil lease events for dozens of years and had never experienced a real protest. And thus, he had as many questions for me as I for him: “Why are they protesting now?” he wondered. “Don’t they know the oil industry is in a depression?”

All of them reiterated how the very low oil prices that we Americans currently enjoy (around $40 a barrel, still, due partly to advances in natural gas extraction) are hurting their wallets. It doesn’t help that their industry already has more than 23m acres under lease in the Gulf of Mexico’s federal waters, with only 18% producing oil or gas, for a total of more than 19m unexploited acres.

“Sometimes it can take two and half hours to read all the bids,” said John Filostrat of BOEM, the federal organization in charge of conducting environmental impact studies for oil drilling projects in various areas before then holding lease sales. “But at the last Gulf auction in 2015, we had the lowest turnout since 1983, with only had a handful of companies bidding 33 tracts,” he remembers. “And we were done in under a half hour.”

Though the protesters made sure the latest bids took longer to read, the sale reported the fourth lowest bids since 1983, attracting only $156m in high bids. The previous Gulf lease sale boasted one single high bid of $52m, compared to a highest bid of $13.6m this time. Most of the new bids actually fell below $200,000, with some less than $100,000. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) now has 90 days to accept or reject the bids.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters said they would be at the public hearings about the new five year plan in April. Photograph: Picasa/Laura Borealis

Though many recent oil lease sales have been similarly slow, BOEM must still follow the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953 and continue offering leases on a schedule laid out five years in advance. This year’s oil lease sales were planned in 2012; BOEM is currently putting together their next five-year plan, covering 2017 to 2021. “When we create our five-year plans, one alternative we always consider is not to hold lease sales at all, usually because the environmental impact is too great,” claims Filostrat. “Some have been cancelled.”

And then Filostrat said something striking: “In the Pacific,” he said, “we haven’t held lease sales in decades, because [of] environmental concerns, and because the states are so much against them”.

Meaning, if the Gulf states were actually against drilling, it could stop. Louisiana’s dependence on oil jobs remains, however, and may never untangle itself from it: you cannot argue with jobs, especially in such a red state.

This is why the Bucket Brigade’s recent demands also included the oil industry creating 1,000 jobs repairing the estimated 27,000 dead oil wells that Rolfes says are out there.

“While the oil industry is laying off workers because of the drop in the price per barrel of oil, the industry in fact needs more workers to prevent ongoing accidents,” says Rolfes. “I grew up in Lafayette, I have relationships with a lot of these workers so I know these guys. I know the work is difficult and the problems are passed on to the workers, who are freaked out because the infrastructure is so weak.”

Though the protesters could have picked a better event, Rolfes and company left happy just to have loudly expressed a dissenting viewpoint, and to have started a new ball rolling: “We sent a really clear message that we don’t want drilling,” she said. “We will be at the public hearings about the new five year plan in April, but today was awesome, and a great moment for the Gulf of Mexico: Before, we used to let these lease sales happen without remark. And now we don’t.”