Dem
47
GOP
53
Yesterday Joe Biden banned oil and gas drilling up and down the East Coast, the West Coast and the Gulf Coast. Pick an American Coast, and the odds are that oil and gas drilling is now banned there. This will protect 625 million acres (977,000 square miles) of ocean from drilling and pollution. At his announcement, Biden said: "We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient, and the food they produce secure and keeping energy prices low. Those are false choices."
Donald Trump campaigned on "Drill, baby, drill," so what happens next? It should be interesting. Biden took this action under Sec. 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. That law says his actions have no expiration date and prohibit all future leasing in the covered areas. But can Trump just undo the ban?
According to the law, the president's action is permanent. It is not like an XO that the next president can reverse. Congress could try to change the law, but the Senate Democrats would filibuster that. So will Trump just accept defeat on this? We doubt it. He will probably issue leases to drill in the forbidden areas and then wait to be sued. When the case gets to the Supreme Court, which is inevitable, Trump will argue that no president can take an action that binds a future president, only Congress can do that. The plaintiffs will argue that Congress specifically gave the president the power to make permanent decisions, thus binding future presidents, the same way a president can negotiate a treaty and after the Senate ratifies it, it binds future presidents.
There is one other X factor. Petroleum companies know that they are going the way of the dinosaur sooner or later (full circle, as it were, since the dinosaurs went the way of petroleum). They also know that Trump won't be in charge forever. Add these two things up, and they are increasingly reluctant to invest in expensive offshore drilling infrastructure that might, or might not, pay off. The first Trump administration actually had trouble selling the leases it wanted to sell, and that was without the looming hassle of a multi-year lawsuit. (V)