President-elect Donald Trump on Monday vowed to quickly reverse President Joe Biden’s lame-duck push to ban oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coast.
Trump said in a radio interview that he plans to undo Biden’s policy “immediately” after he takes office later this month, although doing so would likely require help from Congress.
The incoming president slammed Biden’s offshore drilling ban Monday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. Biden announced earlier Monday — two weeks before Inauguration Day — that he was banning new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline.
“It’s ridiculous. I’ll unban it immediately,” Trump said. “It’ll be changed on Day One. I can change it immediately.”
Reversing Biden’s move would likely require an act of Congress, where Republicans hold majorities but where a reversal could face opposition from coastal lawmakers who oppose drilling off their home states’ shores.
Biden moved Monday to block offshore oil and gas leasing of 625 million acres where the White House said the environmental and economic risks of drilling outweigh their “limited fossil fuel resource potential.” The White House and environmentalists see the move as a way to bolster Biden’s conservation legacy as he prepares to leave office.
But Trump and his industry allies are furious about the outgoing administration’s move that could hamstring the incoming administration’s plans to expand domestic fossil fuel production.
The Biden team is “always saying, ‘Oh, no, we want to have a smooth transition from party to party,” Trump said Monday. “Well, they’re making it really difficult. They’re throwing everything they can in the way.”
Biden’s ban — including areas along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of the northern Bering Sea off the Alaskan coast — covers areas with minimal oil and gas production.
Still, industry groups and Republicans called for lawmakers to move quickly to unravel the policy that could tie the new administration’s hands on drilling in those areas.
“We call on Congress and the incoming Administration to use all available tools to reverse this policy,” said Christopher Guith, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute.
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement Monday that Congress “will use every tool, including reconciliation, to restore and unleash these revenues, fueling conservation, coastal resilience, and energy independence, and ensuring America — not OPEC, Russia or China — leads the world.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said the move is part of the outgoing administration’s work “to make bold and enduring changes that recognize the impact of oil and gas drilling on our nation’s coastlines.”
The climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement’s Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay praised the Biden ban as a “massive victory for our generation and for communities on the front lines of oil and gas extraction.”
Trump’s expected efforts to undo the drilling ban could lead to clashes on Capitol Hill or in the courts. A federal judge in 2017 struck down a Trump move to reverse Obama-era offshore drilling restrictions, finding that only Congress could do so.
As he prepares to take office in two weeks, Trump also assailed Biden administration spending on climate and clean energy programs — including wind turbines — in his radio interview Monday.
“They’re giving out trillions of dollars in nonsense and Green New Deal crap that isn’t worth a damn thing,” Trump said.
Trump, a longtime critic of wind turbines, accused the Biden administration of “putting windmills all over the place that are destroying every beautiful plain and field and mountain.
“It’s so sad when you fly over the country and you see all these horrible-looking structures, half of them are closed down, rusted and rotted. Their life is over. You know, they last a very limited period of time, and then everybody just leaves them,” he said. “They’re just destroying the beauty of our country. It’s hard to believe environmentalists like windmills.”
