Bloomberg reports that Trump will sign an executive order next week that will allow more offshore drilling that puts an end to Obama’s five-year leasing plan that precluded auctions in those areas.
The Interior Department will soon sell offshore oil and natural gas rights in the Atlantic and Arctic waters.
It’s also the beginning of the end for Obama’s ban on leasing U.S. Arctic waters and some of the Atlantic Ocean in perpetuity.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke stated in March, that “opening more federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling” was a pillar of Trump’s plan to make the United States “energy independent.”
Heritage and others have stated that there is an environmental benefit to offshore drilling in “the reduction of oil and gas seepage due to decreases in subsea oil-reservoir pressure.”
Progressives won’t like it and Bloomberg doesn’t think implementing the executive order will be an easy task.
Obama formalized those withdrawals from these areas under the protection of an obscure provision in a 1953 law that does not explicitly give presidents the power to reverse previous designations.
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Predictions are that Trump executive order will not survive in the courts. It would be nice if the Congress would step in and help him out with some legislation.
“The administration can stare all day at the statute Obama used to protect large parts of the Arctic and Atlantic, but they won’t find a syllable allowing Trump to revoke those protections. Neither will the courts,” said Niel Lawrence, Alaska director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It’s hard to imagine riskier, more expensive or time-consuming places to look for oil,” Lawrence said by email. “It would be an extraordinary misuse of public dollars and agency resources to try to open them up now.”
In December of last year, Barack Obama designated the bulk of U.S.-owned waters in the Arctic Ocean and certain areas in the Atlantic Ocean as indefinitely off limits to future oil and gas leasing.
He sold out America in his last days. It was one of those things he did to make it harder for Trump to be a successful president.
In his statement, Obama said significant production in the Arctic will not occur in the current low oil price environment, citing the Department of the Interior analysis. He said Arctic communities must focus on economic diversification.
In other words, find jobs doing something else.
Obama made use of an arcane provision in a 1953 law to ban offshore leases in the waters permanently. The statute says that “the president of the United States may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf.”
The environmental extremists hope this will be hard, if not impossible, to overturn.
However, this law was very narrow and not intended for this purpose.
The left-wing judges in this country appear to have more power than the president, however. We are lucky they didn’t take over the Supreme Court. It would still be nice to see Congress pass a new law and save the time and expense of lawsuits.
Charles Krauthammer addressed it at the time.
“This is so egregious, it’s perfectly revealing of the fact that Obama as he leaves the White House, he’s trying to nail everything to the floor so it can’t be moved. Of course, it can be moved.”
