Last year, Planet Experts expressed surprise and dismay that the Obama administration was opening the Atlantic Ocean to offshore oil drilling. The official announcement arrived just five short years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, in which 210 million gallons of oil were unleashed into the Gulf of Mexico and whose impact is still being felt on the Gulf’s economy and wildlife today. Environmentalists had hoped that the White House would exercise more caution in approving further oil leases along the U.S. coastline, especially considering that, for the last three decades, there has been bi-partisan support in Congress for a moratorium on drilling the region.
NOAA map of the 3,858 oil and gas platforms extant in the Gulf of Mexico in 2006. (Photo Credit: NOAA)
“[T]he last thing we need is to expose Atlantic or Arctic waters to a BP-style blowout,” said Bob Deans, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-author of a book on the BP spill.
Indeed, Obama’s approval of further drilling seemed at odds with his fiery environmental rhetoric. Again and again on the international stage, the President decried the impacts of climate change and urged world leaders to transition to clean fuels.
“His work on climate change is a bit contradictory,” Dr. Chad Nelsen, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, told Planet Experts. “It’s hard to imagine how you can have both.”
But today, the White House announced that it will, in fact, not be approving new oil leases in the Atlantic Ocean.
This is good. Right?
Venoco’s Platform Gail in the Sockeye Field, Santa Barbara Channel. (Photo Credit: Ken Lund / Flickr)
What Kind of Wacky Shell Game Is Obama Playing Here?
For those of you playing at home, this turnaround may feel eerily familiar.
Back in November, the President announced to the nation that he would not approve the construction of the massive Keystone XL oil pipeline. The question had hung over his administration for seven years, angering the environmentalists one one side of the debate and the pro-fossil fuel interests on the other. At the time of the announcement, Obama claimed that he owed his decision to his commitment to cleaner energy, the country’s need to reduce its carbon emissions and the steadily falling price of oil rendering the pipeline obsolete.
In truth, the KXL, if constructed, was always endangered by America’s fracking boom and would never have created more than 50 long-term jobs. And yet Obama held off on making that decision as long as he could.
We here at Planet Experts were feeling deja vu, because just one month previous to the KXL announcement, the U.S. Interior Department announced that it was suspending the sale of offshore drilling leases in the Arctic. As with KXL and today’s Atlantic decision, we were enthused but confused by the news. The Arctic’s Chukchi Sea had been opened to offshore drillers following a couple years of legal wrangling and several environmental reports that drilling in the Arctic was a bad idea. Niel Lawrence, the Alaska director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the Arctic ocean, “is flat out the worst place on Earth to drill for oil.”
Still, Shell and ConocoPhillips spent years persuading the federal government to give them land in the Arctic (Shell alone spent an estimated $7 billion in the process). In April 2015, the Interior Department approved Shell’s leases, despite admitting in 2014 that drilling in the Chukchi carried a 75 percent risk of one or more large oil spills occurring. So we were pretty pissed off about that.
But then some funny things happened. First, the White House put stringent restrictions on how Shell could drill, and when. Then, rough weather significantly delayed Shell’s ability to actually drill in the Chukchi (the Greenpeace protesters hanging from bridges didn’t help). Then, Shell seemingly threw up their hands and said, “the hell with it, we’re taking our ball and leaving.” And then, the Obama administration said, “You know what? We changed our minds. Nobody’s drilling in the Arctic right now.”
And today we learned that the administration isn’t cool with drilling in the Atlantic anymore either. The only difference in this flip-flop is that this time it’s only taken the White House a year to flip that flop.
But can we really chalk this up to simple capriciousness on the part of Barack Obama? No, we really cannot. The government is much bigger than just one man, after all.
President Barack Obama (Source: WikiMedia Commons)
Either It’s Exactly What It Sounds Like, or It Ain’t
According to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, public outcry against Atlantic drilling and objections from the Pentagon are what quashed the great Atlantic land grab.
“We heard from many corners that now is not the time to offer oil and gas leasing off the Atlantic coast,” said the Secretary in a statement. “When you factor in conflicts with national defense, economic activities such as fishing and tourism, and opposition from many local communities, it simply doesn’t make sense to move forward with any lease sales in the coming five years.”
Nearly 100 coastal communities said no thank you to the sales, and the Interior received over one million responses during the plan’s public comment period. The Pentagon, meanwhile, identified “areas where the [Defense’s] offshore readiness activities are not compatible, partially compatible or minimally impacted by oil and gas activities,” according to spokesman Matthew Allen.
Albemarle Sound, Columbia, North Carolina. (Photo Credit: Ingrid Lemme)
The Washington Post reports that the response from the oil industry was “immediate and negative.”
“America’s job creators have become accustomed to the relentless drumbeat of anti-energy policies from the Obama administration,” said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for 21st Century Energy. But to deny drilling off the East Coast “is nevertheless remarkable for its catering to fringe constituencies at the expense of energy security and the American economy.”
Of course, that assumes that the future of American jobs will not benefit from the extreme growth of clean energy or that fossil fuel development such as coal is not in decline.
Surely public comments have merit in a democracy, and do not mistake what I am about to say for faithlessness in the federal bureaucracy. But I wonder – and bear with me because this is purely speculation – if closing the Atlantic was really so beholden to public approval. Maybe, after two terms of getting nothing from the conservative powers that be but grief and gridlock, President Obama is no longer content to dangle compromises in front of his intractable colleagues – namely, those whom value fossil fuel projects above all other U.S. matters. Perhaps Obama never wanted to approve the KXL or maintain Arctic drilling leases or open the Atlantic to offshore drilling, but he had to in the hopes of making some necessary legal sausages. With Republicans having already promised that they’ll fight tooth and nail to deny him appointing another justice to the Supreme Court – despite having 10 months left in his term – maybe Obama is what the French refer to as, “fait avec cette merde.”
Or maybe not. The administration is still planning to offer 10 new drilling leases in the Gulf and three leases have yet to be explored in the Arctic. So maybe that’s all vengeful thinking on my part.
What is certainly true, however, is that coastal groups are celebrating today, and with good reason. When I interviewed Chad Nelsen earlier this year, he said that stopping the Atlantic leases was one of Surfrider’s major priorities for 2016.
Surfrider Foundation CEO Chad Nelsen. (Photo Courtesy of Surfrider)
“It’s a huge threat to Atlantic Ocean ecosystem, a huge threat to the coast and a threat to the coastal communities up and down that stretch of coastline. That’s something we’d like to stop,” said Nelsen. “Fortunately there’s a groundwell of local opposition, over a hundred communities up and down that stretch of coast have signed resolutions in opposition to drilling. A hundred percent of the coastal communities in South Carolina, for example, have opposed offshore drilling. So you’re seeing a huge disconnect between their federal representatives in Washington and the locals on the ground.”
Congratulations, Dr. Nelsen. You, your people and the fine citizens up and down these southern United States, scored a victory today.
“This is an incredible day for the Southeast,” said Sierra Weaver, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. “It represents the hard work of thousands of people and protects some of our most cherished places, from the Chesapeake Bay and the Outer Banks to the South Carolina Low country and Georgia barrier islands.”
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