President Joe Biden announced on Monday what he called a permanent stop to new oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of US coastal waters, saying he was making the move because drilling posed unnecessary risks to the environment, public health and the coastal communities’ economies.

The ban is part of an effort to fortify Biden’s environmental legacy in ways that some experts believe could not be quickly reversed by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has heavy support from the oil and gas industry and has promised to expand drilling.

Biden also intends on Tuesday to announce two new national monuments in California, preserving more than 800,000 acres of ecologically fragile and culturally significant tribal lands.

Biden called it a climate imperative to block offshore drilling on about 20 per cent of the nearly 3.2 billion acres of seabed controlled by the US. He is relying on an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which he says gives him the authority for this executive order.

The measure prevents new drilling along the entire Eastern Seaboard; along the Pacific Coast along California, Oregon and Washington; in the eastern Gulf of Mexico; and in the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska.

In many ways, the ban is symbolic. There has been almost no oil and gas exploration off California’s shores since an enormous oil spill near Santa Barbara in 1969 that shocked the nation. Drilling in Arctic federal waters is currently limited to a single facility in the Beaufort Sea. Trump himself imposed a 10-year moratorium on drilling along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Florida when he was courting voters in those states during his re-election campaign in 2020. And the eastern Gulf of Mexico has been under some form of drilling moratorium since 2006.

“The relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” Biden said in a statement.

The executive order would not stop new drilling in the central and western areas of the Gulf of Mexico, some of which has been mandated by Congress.

The Gulf produces nearly 15 per cent of the nation’s oil and accounts for about 97 per cent of US offshore gas production.

“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,” Biden said.

New York Times News Service