By Susan Ferrechio – The Washington Times – Monday, January 6, 2025
President Biden’s ban on offshore drilling caps his drive to cement green energy policies that he hopes will trip up President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to “drill baby drill” when he takes office in two weeks.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans quickly pledged to reverse Mr. Biden’s eleventh-hour move to block drilling and natural gas leasing in more than 625 million acres of U.S. ocean, including the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska.
The ban covers areas without ongoing or planned drilling and thwarts energy exploration and drilling expansion.
“This effectively takes everything outside the western and central Gulf of Mexico off the table for future exploration and development,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, representing the offshore oil, gas, wind, carbon capture and ocean mineral industries. “We have to be able to go out and actually find the oil and gas. And we don’t even get the chance to do that with a decision like this. So it hurts our economic, energy and national security.”
Mr. Trump promised Monday to quickly “unban” drilling in those areas and called Mr. Biden’s actions “ridiculous.”
Legal experts say Mr. Trump cannot reverse Mr. Biden’s ban with the stroke of a pen.
Instead, Congress may have to reverse Mr. Biden’s order with legislation. Approval could be tricky because of a slim House Republican majority and longtime bipartisan opposition to drilling along the Southeast and West Coasts.
Critics say the ban could be challenged in court as an overly broad interpretation of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which Mr. Biden cited in justifying the move.
Mr. Biden has been putting up obstacles to block Mr. Trump’s plans to ramp up fossil fuel production and to ensure his green energy projects continue after he leaves office. His administration drastically reduced the number of new oil and gas permits as part of his effort to implement a goal of “net zero” fossil fuel emissions by 2050.
Critics say the last-minute moves defy voters who elected Mr. Trump and a Republican-led House and Senate based on pro-energy pledges.
“President Biden wants to enshrine this failed policy into law over the will of the American people. He wants to try to future-proof his legacy, even though the American people have thrown it out, and this is anti-democratic,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.
One of Mr. Biden’s first acts as president, ripping up the Keystone XL Pipeline permit, set into motion a cascade of actions that will be difficult to reverse.
Land easements in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska have been returned to landowners, and other easements have expired.
Retaking the easements would have to begin anew and could face more lawsuits from landowners, said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and president of Bold Alliance, a landowners rights organization.
“They would have to start from the beginning, and landowners know so much more now. They know their rights,” she said.
The challenges will make the Keystone XL project less attractive to investors and the oil industry, which have largely moved on to other pipeline projects.
“It would probably be challenging to get capital markets excited about that,” Lisa Baiton, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, told the North American Energy Conference in November, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
Biden’s green energy initiatives will also be difficult to claw back, even though Mr. Trump has condemned them as wasteful.
On Monday, he told the Hugh Hewitt radio program that his border security initiatives could be funded from “trillions of dollars that we’re going to be clawing back” from Biden-era green energy projects.
Many of the projects were funded as part of the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act and will be difficult to untangle from the billions of dollars in grants and loans for projects throughout the country, including critical investments in manufacturing.
Mr. Trump will also face a vast increase in federally protected lands that are not open to energy development.
Mr. Biden cordoned off thousands of acres of federal land from development by designating them as national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906.
This week, Mr. Biden is expected to use the act to designate two more national monuments in California, which will prohibit development on 850,000 acres of tribal lands.
Mr. Trump had mixed success reversing Obama-era policies aimed at eliminating fossil fuels. He restarted the Keystone XL Pipeline in 2017 but didn’t get far in reversing President Obama’s December 2016 permanent ban on offshore drilling along vast Arctic and Atlantic coast areas.
Mr. Obama used the same 1953 statute that Mr. Biden employed in the latest offshore ban. When Mr. Trump challenged it, a federal judge ruled in 2019 that only Congress can revoke the ban.
Mr. Trump declared Monday on the Hewitt show, “I have the right to unban it immediately.” He pledged to increase oil and gas production, which expanded during the past four years partly because of permits issued during Mr. Trump’s first administration.
“It’ll be more by the time we are finished,” Mr. Trump said. “We have oil and gas at a level that nobody else has. And we’re going to take advantage of it.”
