Cleanup workers search for contaminated sand and seaweed in front of drilling platforms and container ships about one week after an oil spill from an offshore oil platform on Oct. 9, 2021, in Huntington Beach, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
With just two weeks left in his presidency, Joe Biden will prohibit future oil and gas drilling off the entire East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the remaining portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.
Biden will sign two memoranda Monday to permanently ban offshore drilling over more than 625 acres of ocean to advance his commitment to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030, a White House statement said.
The orders come at the request of bipartisan state and local leaders in coastal areas, Biden said, and reflect that the paltry fossil fuel resources in those areas would not be worth the risks of environmental, health and economic harms that could result from oil and gas exploration.
“In balancing the many uses and benefits of America’s ocean, it is clear to me that the relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health, and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” Biden said in the statement.
President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office Jan. 20, criticized Biden throughout last year’s campaign for moves Trump said lowered the country’s energy production. A temporary freeze on oil and gas leases, rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline and other environmental measures taken by the Biden administration were part of what led to increased costs for consumers, Trump argued.
Economists have said that connection is dubious, but Trump is expected to pursue policies to expand oil and gas production.
‘I’ll unban it’
In a statement Monday morning, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt strongly criticized Biden’s move. “This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill,” she said.
In a Monday morning radio interview, Trump pledged to roll back the move.
“It’s ridiculous,” he told host Hugh Hewitt. “I’ll unban it immediately. I will unban it. I have the right to unban it immediately.”
It’s unclear, however, if Trump would have the authority to undo Biden’s action on his own.
A similar issue played out in courts during Trump’s first term, but was eventually dismissed after he lost his 2020 reelection bid.
In April 2017, Trump issued an executive order to revoke offshore drilling restrictions his predecessor, President Barack Obama, had placed.
Environmental groups sued and a federal court in Alaska sided against the Trump administration, reasoning that the law governing offshore drilling, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, allows a president to withdraw areas from drilling but does not allow a president to revoke those withdrawals.
The Trump administration appealed in 2019, but the issue was resolved before an appeals decision when Biden took office and reinstituted the Obama withdrawals in 2021. The court dismissed the case as moot without ruling on the merits of presidential authority.
That means the precedent set at the district court level should remain for Trump’s second presidency, Seth Nelson, a spokesperson for the environmental group Evergreen Action, said Monday.
“This precedent suggests that President-elect Trump would face significant legal obstacles in attempting to reverse President Biden’s ban through executive order, requiring an act of Congress instead,” Nelson wrote in an email.
John Seibels, a spokesman for U.S. House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican, said Monday that reversing the ban would likely require Congress’ cooperation.
“It’s still early, but based on what we’ve seen, this will likely require work by congress to roll back this ban,” he wrote in an email.
In a Monday statement, Westerman said the House GOP majority would work with Trump to increase energy production, saying that Congress would use the legislative procedure known as budget reconciliation to reverse Biden energy policies.
“”While the federal deficit grows, President Biden’s decision to lock away 625 million acres of future energy potential undermines one of our nation’s greatest revenue streams—energy receipts, second only to income taxes,” Westerman said. “In the 119th Congress, we will use every tool, including reconciliation, to restore and unleash these revenues.”
‘We do not need to choose’
Biden, though, described offshore drilling in the vast areas he is protecting as detrimental to long-term U.S. economic health, in part by protecting fishing and tourism industries.
“We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient, and the food they produce secure and keeping energy prices low,” Biden said. “Those are false choices. Protecting America’s coasts and ocean is the right thing to do, and will help communities and the economy to flourish for generations to come.”
The protections “have no expiration date, and prohibit all future oil and natural gas leasing in the areas withdrawn,” according to a fact sheet from the White House.
The orders protect 334 million acres of coast along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, stretching from the Maine-Canada border to the tip of Florida.
Nearly 250 million acres of Pacific coastline that is the habitat for “seals, sea lions, whales, fish, and countless seabirds” off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington will be protected. Governors of the three states had asked for the protections, according to the fact sheet. The last federal lease sale off the mainland West Coast was in 1984.
And 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea will be protected. The protections were sought by many Alaska Native communities, the White House said.
“This is an area where oil and gas development would pose severe dangers to coastal communities, and where the health of these waters is critically important to food security and to the culture of more than 70 coastal Tribes, including the Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Inupiaq people who have relied on these resources for millennia,” the White House said.