Biden Bans Fossil Fuel Drilling Across 600 Million Acres Of U.S. Waters

President Joe Biden on Monday permanently banned oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of federal waters.

Along with cementing Biden’s legacy on combating global climate change, the withdrawal is likely to deliver a lasting blow to President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for unfettered fossil fuel development in the coming years.

Biden’s order — the largest such mineral withdrawal in U.S. history — permanently protects coastal waters spanning the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico and 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea, off the coast of western Alaska.

In a statement Monday, Biden invoked the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, calling it “a solemn reminder of the costs and risks of offshore drilling,” and said drilling in the newly protected coastal areas “could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs.”

“It is not worth the risks,” he said. “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.”

The sweeping protections rely on a provision of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives presidents the power to permanently block offshore leasing for oil and gas development. The law, however, does not include language giving presidents the authority to reverse such a withdrawal.

When President Barack Obama invoked that same provision of the law in 2016 to block offshore drilling in large areas of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, a White House official said the protections would “stand the test of time.”

That has proven true. In 2019, a judge ruled that Trump’s 2017 executive order revoking the Obama-era ban was unlawful and only Congress could lift such withdrawal.

During his first term in office, Trump and his team proposed opening nearly all U.S. waters — roughly 90% of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf — to fossil fuel development. Yet like Obama and now Biden, Trump used section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to withdraw coastal waters around Florida, Georgia and South Carolina from future drilling, in what many saw as political maneuvering in swing states during an election year.

Asked over the weekend about Biden’s forthcoming order, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump, told The New York Times that the Biden administration is waging a “war on American energy” — a go-to claim that ignores the fact that domestic oil and gas production are at record highs.

“When he takes office, President Trump will make America energy dominant again, protect our energy jobs, and bring down the cost of living for working families,” Ms. Leavitt said in a statement.

Environmental groups applauded Monday’s announcement.

“Americans have been calling for these protections for decades, and Oceana applauds President Biden for building on the legacy of Democratic and Republican presidents protecting our coasts from offshore drilling,” Joseph Gordon, director of climate and energy at Oceana, an ocean advocacy group, said in a statement. “Our coastlines are home to millions of Americans and support billions of dollars of economic activity that depend on a clean coast, abundant wildlife, and thriving fisheries.”

Dustin Meyer, senior vice president of policy at the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas trade association, condemned the ban and called on Congress and the incoming Trump administration to “use every tool at their disposal to reverse this politically motivated decision and restore a pro-American energy approach to federal leasing.”

“American voters sent a clear message in support of domestic energy development, and yet the current administration is using its final days in office to cement a record of doing everything possible to restrict it,” he said in a statement.