One of the cornerstones of Donald Trump’s “Day One” agenda — which is packed to the gills with things he plans to do immediately upon taking office — is to dramatically increase US energy production. As Sarah Palin so eloquently put it years ago, Trump wants to “drill, baby, drill.”
It’s not like the US isn’t already the world’s largest exporter of motor gas, and a net exporter of barrels of oil as well. Any effort to increase production would be purely as a calculated way of lining the pockets of politicians and oil executives. It would also thumb its nose at the proven disastrous effects of climate change that have already reshaped vast swaths of the country as a direct result of oil and gas exploration.
It turns out that Joe Biden has something to say about Trump’s plans.
Using an obscure 1953 law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, Biden has, with the stroke of a pen, taken action to protect 625 million acres of offshore areas from future oil and gas drilling. That might throw a wrench in the works for Trump a little bit.
It will protect large areas of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the continental US, as well as the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and the North Bering Sea of Alaska. These are all parts of the Outer Continental Shelf, and the invocation of the law makes the protection permanent. That is, because the law has no provision for how a subsequent president could reverse the decision, Trump would likely have to ask Congress to change the 72-year-old law in order to open those areas back up.
That could prove tricky. After all, as Biden points out, protecting these areas has historically had bipartisan support:
“From California to Florida, Republican and Democratic Governors, Members of Congress, and coastal communities alike have worked and called for greater protection of our ocean and coastlines from harms that offshore oil and natural gas drilling can bring,” Biden said in his announcement.
Trump’s transition spokeswoman and his incoming Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was quick to denounce the action, even quoting Sarah Palin herself:
“This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill. https://t.co/NvWx7oA2vU [1]
— Karoline Leavitt (@karolineleavitt) January 6, 2025 [2]
Of course, as the incoming administration is no doubt already aware, there is no such mandate. Trump’s margin of victory in the Electoral College was one of the smallest in the last hundred years, and he fell short of a majority of the popular vote as well, even using whatever underhanded methods he may have employed to achieve his suspicious results in every single swing state, including the ones where Democrats won all the way down ballot other than the presidential race.
Likewise, the oil barons are pretty angry at the maneuver.
Mike Sommers, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, released a statement of his own calling Biden’s power move “politically motivated.”
“Congress and the incoming administration should fully leverage the nation’s vast offshore resources as a critical source of affordable energy, government revenue and stability around the world,” Sommers said. “We urge policymakers to use every tool at their disposal to reverse this politically motivated decision and restore a pro-American energy approach to federal leasing.”
Isn’t it amazing, how industry leaders call anything that makes them a profit “pro-American” and anything that doesn’t make them a profit “politically motivated”?
I don’t know how Trump and all of his pals can use the phrase “politically motivated” as some kind of epithet with a straight face. Trump has literally spent the last several years promising to turn the entire US government into a political tool to satisfy his own desires, from enriching himself to exacting revenge on his political enemies.
For my money, Biden’s statement — which you can read in its entirety at the link in Ms. Leavitt’s tweet above — is the far more convincing “political” case being made here:
“As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren.”
Joe’s right. The best time was years ago, but the second-best time is right now.