President Biden’s ban on offshore drilling ends his push to cement green energy policies that he hopes will derail President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to “drill a baby” when he will take office in two weeks.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans quickly pledged to reverse Mr. Biden’s last-minute decision to block natural gas drilling and leasing in more than 625 acres of U.S. ocean, including northern the Bering Sea in Alaska.
The ban covers areas with no ongoing or planned drilling and thwarts energy exploration and drilling expansion.
“This effectively removes everything outside of the western and central Gulf of Mexico for future exploration and development,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, representing the country’s offshore industries. oil, gas, wind, carbon capture and ocean minerals. . “We need to be able to go out and find oil and gas. And we don’t even have the opportunity to do that with a decision like this. This therefore harms our economic, energy and national security.
Mr. Trump promised on Monday to quickly “unblock” drilling in these areas and called Mr. Biden’s actions “ridiculous.”
Legal experts say Mr Trump cannot overturn Mr Biden’s ban with the stroke of a pen.
Instead, Congress may need to overturn Mr. Biden’s order through legislation. Approval could be tricky because of a slim Republican majority in the House and long-standing bipartisan opposition to drilling along the Southeast and West coasts.
Critics say the ban could be challenged in court because it is too broad an interpretation of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which Mr. Biden cited to justify the move.
Mr. Biden has thrown up obstacles to block Mr. Trump’s plans to increase fossil fuel production and ensure his green energy projects continue after he leaves office. His administration has significantly reduced the number of new oil and gas permits as part of its efforts to implement a goal of “net zero” fossil fuel emissions by 2050.
Critics say the last-minute measures defy voters who elected Mr. Trump and a Republican-led House and Senate on pro-energy commitments.
“President Biden wants to enshrine this failed policy into law, to the detriment of the will of the American people. He wants to try to continue his legacy, even though the American people rejected him, and that is undemocratic,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment. conservative.
One of Mr. Biden’s first acts as president, de-permitting the Keystone XL pipeline, set off a cascade of actions that will be difficult to reverse.
Land easements in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska were returned to landowners, and other easements expired.
Resumption of easements is expected to begin again and could be subject to new lawsuits from landowners, said Jane Kleeb, chairwoman of the Nebraska Democratic Party and president of Bold Alliance, a landowners’ rights organization.
“We would have to start from the beginning, and landowners know a lot more now. They know their rights,” she said.
These challenges will make the Keystone XL project less attractive to investors and the oil industry, which have largely turned to other pipeline projects.
“It would probably be difficult to get the financial markets excited about this,” Lisa Baiton, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said at the North American Energy Conference in November, according to the Society Radio-Canada.
Biden’s green energy initiatives will also be difficult to salvage, even though Mr. Trump has condemned them as wasteful.
On Monday, he told the Hugh Hewitt radio show that his border security initiatives could be funded by “trillions of dollars that we’re going to recoup” from Biden-era green energy projects.
Many projects were funded under the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act and will be difficult to untangle from billions of dollars in grants and loans intended for projects across the country, including critical investments in the manufacturing sector.
Mr. Trump will also face a dramatic increase in the number of federally protected lands that are not open to energy development.
Mr. Biden banned the development of thousands of acres of federal land by designating them as national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906.
This week, Mr. Biden is expected to use the law to designate two more national monuments in California, which will prohibit development on 850,000 acres of tribal land.
Mr. Trump has had mixed success reversing Obama-era policies aimed at phasing out fossil fuels. He revived the Keystone XL pipeline in 2017, but failed to reverse President Obama’s December 2016 permanent ban on offshore drilling along vast areas of the Arctic and Atlantic coastlines.
Mr. Obama used the same 1953 law that Mr. Biden used for the latest offshore ban. When Mr. Trump challenged it, a federal judge ruled in 2019 that only Congress could revoke the ban.
Mr. Trump said Monday on the Hewitt show: “I have the right to lift the ban immediately.” He has pledged to increase oil and gas production, which has grown over the past four years in part thanks to permits issued during Mr. Trump’s first administration.
“It will be more when we’re done,” Mr. Trump said. “We have oil and gas at a level that no one else has. And we’re going to take advantage of it.
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