It’s more of an “all of the below” strategy, really. After years of complaining about the heavy hand of government being very unfair to poor little oil and coal companies, the Trump administration made a couple of moves this week demonstrating what they actually meant: they would like to kill offshore wind power, and drill up all the offshore oil they can find.
On Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered an immediate halt to the already-started construction on Empire Wind, a 130-turbine project sited between 15 and 30 miles south of Long Island that would power 500,000 New Yorkers’ homes. Burgum claimed this had any reason beyond Trump’s longstanding grievance against wind power in general, saying it would allow “further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
And then on Friday, Burgum again — this time, he announced the start of a process to ramp up offshore oil and gas leasing, replacing the current program that they complain only has three lease sales scheduled in a five-year period, “all located in the Gulf of America” [side note: barf]. “Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, we are unlocking the full potential of our offshore resources to benefit the American people for generations to come,” Burgum said, two days after canceling a project unlocking the potential of some other offshore resources.
The announcement doesn’t set a new lease sale schedule or anything just yet, but instead calls for public comment which surely the administration will carefully consider. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, part of the Interior Department, manages more than 2,000 existing offshore oil and gas leases; 469 of them are currently producing. It is not enough, apparently.
As with everything this administration does, there will be varying degrees of pushback to these sorts of obviously unfair, environmentally catastrophic maneuvers. For its part, the owner of Empire Wind Equinor said it is complying with the order and “engaging with relevant authorities to clarify this matter and is considering its legal remedies, including appealing the order.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it an example of federal overreach, and said the state would “fight this decision every step of the way.”
Environmental activists aren’t going to sit and watch an explosion in offshore oil drilling either (though of course, that explosion won’t happen unless oil prices are such that companies think its worth it). “Trump’s dystopian dream of covering the ocean with oil rigs would devastate marine life and coastal communities and worsen climate chaos,” said Rachel Mathews, a senior attorney with the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity’s Oceans Program, in a statement. “We’ll fight this absurd plan to increase dirty, risky and destructive offshore drilling in U.S. waters.”
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