In his final days as president, Joe Biden has promised to ban drilling in more than 600 million acres off the coast of the western U.S. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has promised to undo the ban, as well as much of Biden’s climate and conservation efforts.
Thing is, this one might be a little trickier to reverse, because Biden can make this declaration thanks to a 70-year-old law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
“It grants the president the power to withdraw certain areas from offshore gas, oil and gas development,” explained Akshaya Jha, who teaches economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
Unlike a regular executive order, “there isn’t a clear mechanism for how a subsequent president can kind of reverse that decision,” he said.
President Barack Obama banned drilling 10 years ago using the same law, and when Trump tried to repeal it, the court ruled it couldn’t get revoked without Congressional approval. So the declaration will stand — at least for awhile.
Still, “it does not appear to have a short- or even medium-term material impact on drilling,” said Morgan Bazilian, who directs the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. “Most of the offshore drilling in the United States comes from the Gulf, and the parts of the Gulf where that drilling is are not covered by this latest ban.”
So, Biden chose to protect a bunch of land where we aren’t doing much oil drilling anyway. It’s largely a political move, argued Hugh Daigle, who teaches in the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering department at UT Austin.
“Biden can say, ‘Look, you know, I’ve done this great thing for the environment,’ while at the same time, not really changing the fact that, you know, the Gulf of Mexico produces a substantial amount of our domestic oil and gas production,” he said.
But Trump has called the move ridiculous and promised to repeal Biden’s decision. Daigle said that’s a political move, too. “it’s really just the other side of the same coin.”
Meanwhile, Daigle added, oil prices have been pretty low recently, so even if there were no ban, expanding production and potentially driving prices even lower is a tough sell right now anyway.
