Burnishing his environmental record and seeking to protect the planet from Trump, President Biden is putting 625 million acres of offshore land in the Atlantic, Pacific, and eastern Gulf of Mexico off limits to oil and natural gas leasing.
Biden is also poised, using the Antiquities Act, to create two big national monuments in California. One is centered on Mt. Shasta, the other in desert mountains near the Salton Sea.
The ban on offshore drilling will be popular in the Pacific Northwest. When, in his first term, Trump toyed with opening the entire Pacific Coast to oil exploration, political figures from both parties led protest treks up coastal beaches of Olympic National Park.
Attorney General (now Gov.-elect) Bob Ferguson and election litigator Kevin Hamilton led a Democrats’ backpack trip honoring President Harry Truman for protecting the coastline and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for campaigning to keep it wild.
Bill Bryant, 2016 Republican gubernatorial candidate, led a trip in honor of a Republican conservationist president, Theodore Roosevelt, who created national wildlife refuges along the coast. A trio of Washington lawmakers have sponsored legislation to put the North Pacific off limits to oil exploration.
In the words of Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., “protecting our environment is foundational to the Pacific Northwest heritage, culture, and quality of life. The federal government should be focused on transitioning to greener energy sources not increasing the risk of disastrous oil spills in our region.” To which, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, D-Wash, added: “Preventing offshore drilling in the region will protect our environment and way of life and identity.”
President Trump, in his first term, moved to eviscerate the Bears Ears and Escalante Grand Staircase National Monuments in southern Utah. Trump cut 1.9 million acres from the two monuments, lands later restored by President Biden.
Trump may be flummoxed this time by an Eisenhower-era law. The 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act gives the president wide powers to withdraw federal waters from leasing. Oilmen went to court when President Obama withdrew Arctic waters from leasing. A federal judge upheld his action.
Besides, Trump deployed the law in his first term to slap a 10-year moratorium on oil leasing off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, battlegrounds in the 2020 presidential race.
U.S. oil production is at an all-time high, 14 percent of it from the Gulf of Mexico. The American Petroleum Institute has made a pro forma protest, saying: “We look forward to working with the incoming administration to bring benefits of offshore oil and natural gas production to the United States through jobs, investment, and domestic energy security.”
Biden is also monument building, at the behest of environmental groups and Native American tribes. The Chuckwaii National Monuments, near the Salton Sea, will protect 600,000 acres of desert and dry mountains near the Salton Sea. The Sattitla National Monuments will protect pools of meltwater that are a substantial source of drinking water.
A legacy action by Biden is in keeping with a tradition. “Every president in this century has recognized that some areas of the ocean are just too sensitive to drill,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of the environmental group Earthjustice .
This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
