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offshore drilling
On Earth Day, Dems Push Bills to Ban Offshore Drilling 'Once and for All'
"Earth Day is an important reminder that every coastal community deserves healthy oceans and oil-free beaches," said one campaigner.
Apr 22, 2025
On Tuesday, to coincide with Earth Day, multiple Democratic senators renewed their effort to pass bills to protect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from offshore oil and gas drilling—part of a broader legislative push by Democrats to safeguard U.S. coastal waters.
Sen. Alex Padilla of California has reintroduced the West Coast Ocean Protection Act, which would permanently end new oil and gas leases for offshore drilling off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington.
"We must end offshore oil drilling in coastal waters once and for all," said Padilla in a statement on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey has reintroduced the Clean Ocean and Safe Tourism (COAST) Anti-Drilling Act, which would permanently prohibit the federal government from issuing leases for the exploration, development, or production of offshore oil and gas in the North Atlantic, Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Straits of Florida planning areas of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.
Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) are leading companion legislation for the two bills in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"California's spectacular marine life—including complex kelp forests and charismatic sea otters—and vibrant coastal economies rely on healthy ecosystems," said Pamela Flick, Defenders of Wildlife California program director, in a statement on Tuesday.
The West Coast Ocean Protection Act "could, once and for all, block offshore drilling activities along the continental shelf, and protect critical marine habitats along California's iconic Pacific Coast," she said.
The legislation comes as environmental leaders warn that this Earth Day puts a focus on the need to resist the Trump administration's attacks on environmental regulation and programs.
On President Donald Trump's first day in office, he initiated plans to make federal land and waters open for oil drilling and mining, including in fragile wilderness in Alaska. Trump also declared a national energy emergency.
Beyond the West Coast Ocean Protection Act and the COAST Anti-Drilling Act, Democratic lawmakers in Congress have reintroduced several other bills in recent weeks aimed at safeguarding coasts.
Those bills include the Florida Coastal Protection Act, which would protect the coast of Florida and eastern Gulf of Mexico from offshore drilling, exploration, and production, and the New England Coastal Protection Act, which would protect the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, in addition to portions of the North Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf, from offshore drilling.
Conservation groups said they welcome the suite of legislation.
"The path of so-called 'energy dominance' is paved with threats to American coasts," said Sierra Weaver, senior attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement on Tuesday. "This set of bills offers real protections for coastal communities and wildlife against unwanted, unreasonable, and unsafe offshore oil drilling."
Weaver added that the bills are the kind of leadership and action that's needed on the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest marine oil spill in history.
"Oceana applauds these congressional leaders for reintroducing pivotal legislation that would establish permanent protections from offshore oil and gas drilling for millions of acres of ocean," said Oceana campaign director Joseph Gordon in a statement on Tuesday.
"Earth Day is an important reminder that every coastal community deserves healthy oceans and oil-free beaches," he added.
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In First Major Climate Challenge to Trump 2.0, Groups Work to Block Offshore Drilling Once Again
Climate campaigners defeated the president's offshore drilling push during his first term, and they are pledging to do so again.
Feb 21, 2025
Climate advocates are expressing confidence as they file the first major environmental legal challenges to U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, with the legal group Earthjustice noting that campaigners were victorious during Trump's first term when they sued to stop him from gutting protections from offshore oil drilling.
"We defeated Trump the first time he tried to roll back protections and sacrifice more of our waters to the oil industry," said Earthjustice managing attorney Steve Mashuda on Wednesday as the organization filed a challenge against an executive order Trump signed on his first day of his new White House term. "We're bringing this abuse of the law to the courts again."
Trump urged oil and gas companies—which poured nearly $450 million into efforts to get him and other anti-climate Republicans elected last year—to "drill, baby, drill" as he signed the order hours into his second term.
The order rolled back former Democratic President Joe Biden's ban on offshore drilling over more than 625 million acres of coastal territory, including parts of the Gulf of Mexico that were impacted by BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, which killed 11 people and devastated local ecosystems and businesses.
"Trump tried this illegal move to undo protections during his first administration, and he failed. We will keep working to ensure he won't be any more successful this time around."
As Common Dreamsreported in January, Biden invoked the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect areas of the U.S. coasts from future oil and gas leasing, and a federal judge ruled in 2019 that withdrawals under the law cannot be revoked without an act of Congress.
"When nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal counties that rely on a healthy ocean to thrive, removing critical protections shows how little care Trump has for these communities," said Devorah Ancel, senior attorney at Sierra Club, which joined the lawsuit along with climate groups Oceana, Greenpeace, the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and other organizations. "Trump tried this illegal move to undo protections during his first administration, and he failed. We will keep working to ensure he won't be any more successful this time around."
Earthjustice noted that a poll conducted by Ipsos last year on behalf of Oceana found that 64% of Americans want elected officials to keep offshore areas off-limits for new oil and gas leasing. Climate scientists have consistently warned that new fossil fuel projects have no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C or as close to it as possible.
The majority of Americans support ocean protections from offshore drilling. Trump's executive order to rescind protections from offshore drilling is not just illegal – it's deeply unpopular. We're in court to protect coastal communities, public health, regional economies, and marine ecosystems.
— Earthjustice (@earthjustice.bsky.social) February 21, 2025 at 11:28 AM
The possibility of fossil fuel drilling near coastal communities threatens "the health and economic resilience of millions of people who rely on clean and healthy oceans for everything from tourism to commercial fishing," said Earthjustice.
Trump is pushing to open up new areas for offshore drilling even as fossil fuel production in the U.S. has surged to record highs in recent years. He has claimed the country faces an "energy emergency" even as the oil industry has not yet begun drilling in 80% of the millions of public acres of water where it already holds leases.
"Trump's putting our oceans, marine wildlife, and coastal communities at risk of devastating oil spills and we need the courts to rein in his utter contempt for the law," said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is also involved in the legal action. "Offshore oil drilling is destructive from start to finish. Opening up more public waters to the oil industry for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems."
In a separate legal challenge, several climate action groups are asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska to reinstate a 2021 federal ruling that blocked Trump from rolling back offshore protections that had been introduced by the Obama administration in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.
"The Arctic Ocean has been protected from U.S. drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts," said Sierra Weaver, senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. "Though these coastlines have been protected, the administration is showing no restraint in seeking to hand off some of our most fragile and pristine landscapes for the oil industry's profit."
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Biden Tried to Protect the Vulnerable Bering Sea; Will It Work?
The climate emergency has led to dramatic changes for Alaska fish and wildlife and for the subsistence-based communities of the Arctic who depend on these creatures for their survival.
Jan 22, 2025
In early January, as one of his last acts in office, former U.S. President Joe Biden banned future offshore oil and gas drilling on more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters including the entire East Coast, West Coast, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico as well as the northern Bering Sea.
He did this using presidential powers granted under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which in 2019 a federal judge in Alaska ruled cannot be rescinded by a future president. This means, despite his day one executive order reversing Biden’s order, President Donald Trump will likely have to get Congress to pass legislation negating this drilling ban. Three Republican congressmen from Louisiana and Texas have already introduced legislation to do that, but may have a hard time getting fellow Republicans from states like South Carolina and Florida—where anti-drilling sentiment is strong—to go along.
It’s pretty clear why Biden did what he did, first to thwart Trump’s “Drill Baby Drill” energy plan and to burnish his own environmental legacy. What is less clear to most people is why he included 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea off of Alaska in the drilling ban.
“Everything’s declining, even our (summer) moss berries, cloud berries, everything.”
As a Biden White House fact-sheet explained it: “The Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area was established in 2016 and includes one of the largest marine mammal migrations in the world—beluga and bowhead whales, walruses, and seals… the health of these waters is critically important to food security and to the culture of more than 70 coastal Tribes, including the Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Inupiaq people who have relied on these resources for millennia.”
So, what’s the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area? Established by President Barack Obama in December of 2016, it was an attempt to meet the concerns of both Alaska Natives and environmental scientists studying the rapidly changing conditions they were witnessing. Alaska and its waters are today warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world due to a climate phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,” linked to vanishing sea ice. As the Arctic Ocean ice cover that reflects solar radiation back into space has retreated, the dark ocean waters exposed absorb ever greater amounts of heat leading to 2024 being listed as the hottest year on record going back to 1850. 2023 was the previous hottest year. The 10 warmest years have all occurred in the last decade.
This has led to dramatic changes for the fish and wildlife and for the subsistence-based communities of the Arctic who depend on these creatures for their survival. For example, a study published last month found that 4 million common murres, a seabird that frequents the area, recently died as the result of a marine heatwave. This was about half the state of Alaska’s population, and may be the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild bird.
The Bering Sea’s Alaska Native communities—some 70 federally recognized tribes—first requested action under Obama and got both a ban on destructive bottom trawl fishing in the 113,000-square-mile resilience area and a ban on oil drilling in about half the area (rescinded by Trump during his first term and now fully protected by Biden under the Lands Act), also a commitment for the Coast Guard to restrict shipping channels in areas where native communities are involved in fishing, hunting, and whaling (still not finalized by the Coast Guard) and a pledge to consult with these same communities moving forward. Three leading Alaska Native organizations—Kawerak, Inc., the Association of Village Council Presidents, and the Bering Sea Elders Group—released a joint statement on the day Biden acted expressing their “deepest appreciation and gratitude” to him for protecting waters that President Trump hopes to reopen to oil drilling.
I recently interviewed two women from St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands, about 300 miles off the Alaskan mainland in the Bering Sea. Destiny Bristol Kushin is a 20-year-old college student working toward an associate degree in environmental sciences, and her grandmother Zinaida Melovidov is an elder who has lived on the island, with a population of just under 400 people, most of her life. They both talked about the decline of the murres that were hunted for meat and whose eggs were collected on a nearby island where they’ve all but disappeared since the die-off.
“Everything’s declining, even our (summer) moss berries, cloud berries, everything,” Melovidov worries.
“Even in the last 20 years since I was born, you can see the differences in the environment, especially with the seasons. Our summers will be later and foggy where they used to be sunny,” Kushin notes. “Our winters aren’t as snowy. It’s mostly wet now, like rain and snow all during the winter time.”
I’ve heard similar concerns about climate impacts on lives and livelihoods from Alaska Natives in the Aleutians and Southwest Alaska whose villages are also at risk from erosion, flooding, and thawing permafrost.
Even if Biden’s drilling ban in the Bering Sea stands the test of Trump, other threats will remain including oil spills from Russian tankers passing through the 55-mile-wide Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia delivering oil to China via Russia’s Northern Sea Route of retreating Arctic ice. Russia’s oil trade with China has increased since Western sanctions were imposed following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Reflecting these tensions around oil, in 2023 the Russians refused to participate with the U.S. Coast Guard in a joint oil spill response exercise.
Even with drilling protections for coastal America, the U.S. will remain the world’s leading oil and gas producer, including the 14% of national production that comes from the western Gulf of Mexico where the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster took place.
And, with President Trump’s commitment to produce ever more fossil fuels that drive climate disruption and contribute to extreme weather events from heatwaves in the Arctic to the Los Angeles’ firestorms, our problems with oil and gas remain far from over.
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