Biden Says No to Offshore Drilling

President Joe Biden announced Jan. 6, that he will ban new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline. This sets the outgoing president’s climate legacy in stark contrast to President-elect Donald Trump’s climate denialism.
Biden’s order will protect 625 million acres of ocean along the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Bering Sea from the “environmental and economic risks and harms” of offshore energy extraction. Using an obscure provision of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, Biden has permanently withdrawn undisturbed land from being leased to oil and gas companies. This serves as an enormous win for environmental groups as well as protecting coastal and indigenous communities from oil spills and other environmental impacts of offshore drilling