On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden made a bold promise to ban oil and gas permitting on federally owned land. Then, just days after taking office, he laid down a federal leasing moratorium, part of a set of sweeping executive orders on climate change. The pause would give the administration time “to review and reset the oil and gas leasing program,” Biden said at the time. How that program is run has big stakes for the climate; the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that roughly a quarter of all U.S. carbon emissions come from federal oil, gas, and coal extraction. As this week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear, burning those fossil fuels has caused dangerous global warming, and the window to avoid catastrophic consequences is closing fast. And yet, the White House is on pace to hand out more oil and gas drilling permits this year than any under President Trump and the most since George W. Bush left the Oval Office. The boom...