Trump’s Offshore Drilling Obsession |
Image by Zach Theo.
It’s back—the federal government’s push to expand offshore oil drilling.
As the headline last month in the Long Island newspaper Newsday reported: “Plan for New Oil Drilling Off Fla. and Calif. Coasts.” The following day, November 22, Newsday ran a nationally-syndicated cartoon by Paul Dukinsky depicting President Trump declaring in front of a line of offshore wind turbines: “Wind Turbines Ruin the View!” Then there was Trump in front of a bunch of offshore oil drilling rigs saying: “…But Oil Rigs are Beautiful!”
The New York Times two days later ran a piece with more details headlined: “In One Week, President Makes Moves to Reshape U.S. Environmental Policy.” This involves, it noted,
“new oil and gas drilling across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters, including a remote region of the high Arctic where drilling has never taken place.” It said the “plan to hold as many as 34 sales of leases” takes in “an area more than half the size of the United States.”
On December 4, some 28 Democratic members of Congress from California sent a letter to Trump and U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying: “We stand united with the overwhelming majority of Californians who fundamentally oppose any proposal that would expand offshore drilling and risk our state’s invaluable, ecologically unique coast. This proposal, coupled with ongoing efforts to reduce federal staffing and funding for agencies that protect our environment, including for safety and oil spill response, is not only dangerous but outright reckless.”
“As we have repeatedly seen in California and other parts of the country, offshore drilling is a ticking time bomb,” they continued. “Any expansion of offshore drilling in the waters off the coast of California and the spills that would inevitably accompany it would be devastating to the communities we represent.”
The waters off the Atlantic Coast are not in the Trump administration plan, as of now.
It’s been decades since I broke the story of........