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President Joe Biden is taking major steps to protect American lands and waters in his final weeks in office. Monday morning, the White House announced the president was banning new oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of water off the U.S. coast.
The ban, which is authorized under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, blocks new drilling off the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska; the Pacific coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington; the entire Eastern Seaboard; and the eastern Gulf of Mexico. In all, the offshore drilling ban affects about 20 percent of the ocean floor controlled by the United States.
In a statement, Biden acknowledged that the coastal communities covered by the ban are not major oil and gas producers.
“The relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” Biden said.
The drilling ban comes on the heels of a number of environmental actions over the holidays:
The company that wants to drain a Mojave Desert aquifer
In the last episode of The Landscape for 2024, Kate and Aaron talk to Chris Clarke, host of the 90 Miles from Needles podcast, about the Cadiz pipeline project, a proposal that poses a huge threat to the Mojave Desert. This project has been around in some form or another for over four decades and critics say the latest iteration is especially insidious. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Never to be accused of subtlety, House Republicans are making clear on Day 1 of the new Congress that they are ready to drive Trump’s drill-baby-drill agenda by making it quicker and easier to sell off America’s public lands to the highest bidder.”
