Environmental advocates have been pushing President Barack Obama to use a 1953 law to permanently bar much of the U.S. Arctic Ocean and a piece of the Atlantic from offshore drilling as part of his environmental legacy. Unnamed sources told Bloomberg and The New York Times that the administration could announce a decision to do just that as soon as today.
If so, that would remove large but unknown amounts of oil and gas from the nation’s inventory. An estimated 27 billions of barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are contained offshore in the U.S. Arctic alone. Climate and other eco activists argue that those fossil fuels should not be extracted because of threats to sea life and the atmosphere.
A spokesperson from the American Petroleum Institute labeled the possibility of a permanent ban “incredibly short-sighted.” But Niel Lawrence, Alaska director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. told Bloomberg: "If the reports are right, then this is a gift to the public and to our kids that will rank with any in the history of American conservation."
The president has already stopped the selling of any new offshore leases in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific from 2017 to 2022.
Coral Davenport reports:
The 1953 law, which governs how the executive branch uses and leases federal waters for offshore energy exploration, includes a provision that allows presidents to put those waters off-limits to oil and gas drilling. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton used the law to protect sections of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans, but those protections came with time limits, usually one to two decades. [...]
Under that law, every president puts forth periodic five-year plans laying out how the waters of the nation’s outer continental shelf may be leased for drilling or protected. Mr. Obama’s most recent five-year plan put the entire Atlantic and portions of the Arctic coast off-limits to drilling. But Mr. Trump could easily open them up in his five-year plan.
That may not actually be so easy, however.
In the past, presidents altered the decisions of their predecessors to bar drilling from selected areas, but they have never completely eliminated those bans. And it’s not clear that a president actually can rescind such decisions by a predecessor. In 1938, U.S. Attorney General Homer Stillé Cummings stated in a written opinion that a president has no such authority when it comes to national monuments. Whether that would apply to the 1953 statute is up in the air since there have been no federal court rulings on the matter. A rescission could spark litigation that lands the administration in court for years.
Whatever the case—if Obama adopts the ban, at the very least expect howls from the guy who will move into the White House on Jan. 20.