The State, August 14, 2024
The Island Packet, August 14, 2024
The Sun News, August 14, 2024
Opinion: We stopped him once. We’d do it again. Why we can’t let Trump ‘drill, baby, drill’ in the Atlantic
By Frank Knapp Jr.
In April 2017, three months after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to encourage oil exploration and drilling off the Atlantic coast. Then in January 2018, the Trump administration proposed a five-year plan to open 90% of the nation’s offshore reserves to private development.
Trump’s efforts failed thanks to business leaders, public officials from both parties, state and local governments and environmental groups fighting to protect the Atlantic coast from Big Oil. But now the Atlantic coast is threatened once again.
After defeating Trump in 2020, President Joe Biden honored a campaign pledge and stopped all new oil leases in public waters, temporarily blocking offshore oil drilling in areas not already approved for it. He did allow some offshore drilling in the Arctic, but now Donald Trump is back with the mantra of “Drill, baby, drill” in speeches and on his re-election website.
It could be worse than his first term. The 2024 Republican Party platform calls for lifting “crippling restrictions” on Americans’ energy production that it cites as “threats to our very survival.” That echoes the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a document that details a governing agenda for a new conservative administration and outlines how Trump could quickly move forward on the goal of offshore drilling.
The offshore oil section of Project 2025 was written by William Perry Pendley, who was President Trump’s acting director of the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of the Interior, which is responsible for managing our country’s natural resources, including our oceans. Pendley says a new administration must roll back Biden’s orders immediately and reinstate the Trump-era “Energy Dominance Agenda” and with it an “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy.”
With that, the Atlantic coast would again be threatened with economic and environmental disaster from offshore oil exploration and drilling. And the fight would be renewed.
Offshore drilling opponents understand the economic devastation the Eastern seaboard’s tourism and fishing industries face. Oil spills would blacken beaches and contaminate estuaries where fish breed. Oil exploration would reduce commercial fishing catch rates 40%-80% and physically harm fish, sea turtles, squid, crabs and scallops.
In 2016, I co-founded and led the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast, which grew to over 42,000 businesses and 500,000 commercial fishing families. Opponents’ joint efforts were able to delay the Trump administration’s offshore oil plans in the Atlantic until November 2018, when permits were issued for oil exploration.
The South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging the legality of the seismic testing permitting process because it failed to consider the anticipated damage to local economies. Sixteen of South Carolina’s coastal municipalities and the state Attorney General’s Office joined the suit.
That suit, which was combined with a legal challenge from environmental groups, successfully ran out the clock on the permits. In October 2020, the federal judge dismissed it because the time to implement the permits was about to run out. President Biden was elected the next month.
Now, businesses again stand ready to block any oil exploration and drilling in the Atlantic should Trump be re-elected. However, the fight will be much harder because of the lessons the Trump administration learned in his first failed attempt.
Fortunately, there is a better solution to this offshore drilling threat.
Under Section 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a president can protect any unleased areas of public waters from any disposition, including oil production.
Presidents Barack Obama and Trump used this authority sparingly, but President Biden can use it now to cement his legacy of protecting the entire Atlantic coast and the west coast of Florida from offshore drilling so that no matter the outcome of the November election, our coastal tourism and fishing economies will be protected permanently.
Knapp is president and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce and former president and CEO of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast.
https://www.thestate.com/opinion/article290920959.html
https://www.islandpacket.com/opinion/article290920959.html
https://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/opinion/article290920959.html