Dive Brief:
- President Joe Biden announced an executive action on Monday which protects more than 625 million acres of US coastal areas from future offshore drilling.
- The move to ban new offshore oil and gas leasing in most US coastal waters includes the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington, Oregon and California and additional parts of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska.
- Biden said the move is part of his push for healthy oceans and clean energy. “As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we transition to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren,” he said in the statement .
Diving knowledge:
President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised to increase domestic fossil fuel production, said he would undo the decisionaccording to The Washington Post.
“I’m going to unban it immediately,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday.
However, this will be difficult to do, according to the New York Times. Biden invoked the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which gives presidents broad authority to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development. To reverse the ban, Trump would first have to get Congress to change the law.
The immediate impact of Biden’s ban is minimal: It covers areas where there has been little oil and gas exploration, or areas that are already protected, according to The New York Times. In fact, Trump himself imposed a 10-year moratorium on drilling along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Florida when he was courting voters in those states in 2020.
Biden’s executive order would not stop new drilling in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, which produces nearly 15 percent of the country’s oil and accounts for about 97 percent of its offshore gas production. Meanwhile, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, included in the new protections, has been under some sort of drilling moratorium since 2006.
