The Obama administration has delayed a fossil fuel auction originally scheduled for Dec. 10 in Washington, D.C. after climate activists pressured the president to cancel it, calling its timing amid the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris "particularly egregious."

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management Eastern States announced on Monday that it would be rescheduling the oil and gas lease sale, which focuses on publicly owned lands in Michigan and Arkansas, for March 17, 2016. On that date, it will be combined with the next quarterly lease sale.

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Last week a coalition of climate organizations, including large groups such as 350.org, CREDO, the Indigenous Environmental Network and Greenpeace USA, joined a mobilization as part of the "Keep It in the Ground" movement, calling on the the administration to cancel the auction and phase out the overall practice of selling unleased fossil fuels.

If Obama had not canceled this auction, activists had planned to hold demonstrations outside the auction site.

"Keeping fossil fuels in the ground has quickly become the new standard for climate leadership," Jason Kowalski, U.S. policy director at 350.org, said in a statement. "The Obama administration clearly recognized that it couldn’t present itself as a climate leader in Paris if it was peddling fossil fuels at home."

The government holds these auctions regularly for the federal leasing of publicly owned lands to private companies. In September, the Keep It in the Ground coalition signed a letter addressed to President Obama, urging him to deem yet-to-be-leased oil, coal and natural gas "unburnable."

Pres. Obama can give #COP21 a big boost by ending all public sales of fossil fuels. #keepitintheground is what climate action looks like. — 350 dot org (@350) December 7, 2015

It's important to clarify that the Dec. 10 auction is as of now postponed, not canceled. As a result, it may appear to some as an attempt on the Bureau of Land Management's part at avoiding poor optics during the crucial last days of climate negotiations in Paris.

"If the administration can't handle the optics of auctioning fossil fuels while negotiating a climate deal in Paris, it shouldn’t be auctioning off fossil fuels at all," Taylor McKinnon, public lands campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. "It's time to end the federal fossil fuel leasing program to align public lands management with our climate goals, and keep up to 450 billion tons of carbon pollution in the ground."

The American public collectively owns nearly 650 million acres of public land and the fossil fuels beneath it, according to the National Wildlife Federation. It also owns more than 1.7 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf lands that also contain oil and gas resources.

A study published in Nature earlier this year found that the way energy companies continue to spend millions on finding new oil, gas and coal reserves is at odds with curbing global warming.

An August report from Ecoshift Consulting showed that halting the practice of selling oil, gas and coal to the fossil fuel industry would keep 90% of those fossil fuels in the ground, and prevent 450 billion tons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere.