President Joe Biden will prohibit new offshore gas and oil drilling along the majority of the U.S. coastline, the White House said Monday.
“The order will preserve around 625 million acres of ocean along the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines of America, the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Bering Sea from “environmental and economic risks and impacts,” the White House said in a statement announcing the action.
Additionally, it is an effort to shield Biden’s climate legacy from the energy strategy that Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump plan to implement.
Biden will make use of a little-known clause in the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) of 1953 that allows the president to permanently remove unleased outer continental shelf lands.
Monday’s action is much larger and will be seen as a major victory for environmental groups that have long argued that further drilling is incompatible with the U.S. government’s stated goal of reducing emissions that cause climate change, even though former President Barack Obama used the act in 2016 to protect 119 million acres of land.
The hottest year on record occurred last year.
Drilling off these coasts is needless to meet our country’s energy requirements and could destroy places we cherish forever. In a statement, Biden stated that the dangers were not worth it.
“Now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren as the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the nation and we are moving toward a clean energy economy,” he continued.
Trump’s ambitions to double down on the expanded oil and gas development he oversaw in his first administration could be thwarted by Biden’s decision, which would increase the total area of ocean he has protected to 670 million acres, more than any other president.
Trump attempted to overrule Obama’s decision to use OCSLA in the last month of his presidency during his first administration by using an executive order, but the court overturned that judgment. This implies that a congressional act might be required to undo the Biden administration’s pronouncement from Monday.
Trump appointed Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as his choice to head the Department of Energy the week following his victory in the 2024 presidential election.
In a 2023 video uploaded to his LinkedIn page, Wright stated that there is no climate crisis and that we are not currently experiencing an energy transition. Wright has previously written about the necessity of increasing the production of fossil fuels in order to help people escape poverty.
The Biden administration also stated that the moratorium would encompass the entire eastern U.S. Atlantic coast and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, even though the energy sector has not shown much interest in many of the protected areas. Oil corporations have expressed interest in both locations, despite Trump’s own actions during his first term to ban drilling there.
In 2020, Trump imposed a drilling freeze in regions where Republicans in Florida and voters in North Carolina strongly opposed oil and gas production.
Biden claimed that development in many of the locations shielded by Monday’s statement will not significantly, if at all, contribute to the country’s energy needs.
President Biden’s actions today are part of our commitment throughout this Administration to make big and lasting improvements that acknowledge the impact of oil and gas drilling on our country’s coastlines, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haalands said in a statement in response to the news.
According to her, the President is acting today in response to the states, Tribes, and local communities who have expressed to us the urgent and overwhelming need to safeguard resilient coastlines and oceans from needless oil and gas development.
“We do not have to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our oceans healthy, our coastlines resilient, and the food they produce secure and keeping energy prices low,” Biden said, citing the lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, in which 134 million gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. Those are poor decisions.
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