Biden Issues Sweeping Offshore Drilling Ban Just in Time for Congress to Undo It

President Joe Biden issued an order on Monday that protects 625 million acres of offshore territory from oil and gas drilling, a sweeping move aimed at shoring up his climate legacy after a term marked by definitive ups and downs on the topic. He’ll be lucky if it survives two months.

“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs. It is not worth the risks,” Biden said in a statement. “As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren.”

The move, which was reported before the order was issued last week by Bloomberg News and then with acreage and other details by the Washington Post, takes the entire eastern seaboard off the oil drilling map; along with the eastern Gulf of Mexico; parts of the Pacific off of Washington, Oregon, and California; and parts of the Bering Sea off of Alaska. Some of this is more academic than anything else — there is no offshore oil drilling off the East Coast, and little interest from the industry in doing so. The eastern Gulf is a different story; Big Oil has long prized some of that territory, to join in the piece of water off of Louisiana where the bulk of Gulf drilling now takes place.

Writ large, this sounds great — an enormous chunk of water, an area that when combined would make it the 10th-largest country on earth, ahead of Algeria, now off limits to the industry simply frothing at the mouth to expand its operations in every direction possible and help accelerate the climate crisis. But this sure seems like something Biden could have taken care of a couple of months ago: as new Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman Mike Lee (R—Utah) told The Post, there is an obvious method for the new Republican trifecta to overturn Biden’s order.

“Senate Republicans will push back using every tool at our disposal,” Lee told The Post, citing the possible use of the Congressional Review Act. That law allows Congress to overturn executive orders within 60 days of their enactment with a majority vote. The new Congress is already seated; Trump who told Hugh Hewitt on Monday that he would “unban it immediately,” which is not a thing that can happen but still, takes over in 14 days. Biden’s order is made under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which does not let a president undo prior bans; Congress can have at it though.

It’s no guarantee, of course, that the Congress will manage the feat. Republicans are hardly a united front, as demonstrated by the razor-thin Speaker of the House vote last week, and who knows whether some in the legislature will quietly be okay with keeping the next Deepwater Horizon away from their shores. Still, it’s an issue that Biden could have avoided by just doing exactly what he did in, say, October.

For the moment though, advocates and activists are celebrating the move. “This is an epic ocean victory,” said one from the NGO Oceana, according to the BBC. We’ll see if it lasts.