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In the last days of his administration, President Joe Biden is planning to permanently ban new offshore oil and gas development in American coastal waters, leaving a mess for the incoming President-elect Donald J. Trump.

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The outgoing president is placing difficult-to-remove environmental restrictions for off-shore marine areas via executive order before he leaves the White House, reported Bloomberg.

Biden will ban the sale of new marine drilling rights in sections of the nation’s waters using the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs offshore oil and gas development.

The 72-year-old law gives presidents wide discretion to permanently protect the country’s waters from oil and gas leasing without explicitly granting future administrations authority to revoke the protected designations.

Presidents have long invoked the provision to preserve domestic waters, wildlife, and other sensitive marine resources, starting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who created the Key Largo Coral Reef Preserve in 1960.

Critics see the move as a cynical attempt to delay Trump’s campaign promise to boost domestic energy production. 

After considering this proposal for more than two years, Biden acceded to demands from House Democrats and environmentalist NGOs to act before he left the White House.

The environmental lobby called for maximum restrictions against offshore drilling, allegedly to protect vulnerable coastal communities and vulnerable marine ecosystems from oil spills and to fight climate change.

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This planned move is in line with recent actions by the administration to restrict swaths of land from industrial mining and energy development, including a scheme pushed last week by Biden’s Department of the Interior, to stop the sale of new energy extraction leases in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains.

The Biden administration has restricted access to federal lands and waters for new offshore oil and gas development more than any other administration at the behest of radical environmentalist groups, causing a slowdown in domestic energy extraction as global demand and prices have hit new highs.

The Biden White House has particularly targeted drilling in the Pacific coast of California and the eastern Gulf of Mexico waters by Florida with executive orders and has only allowed three auctions of offshore oil and gas leases to take place over the next five years, a historic low.

According to Bloomberg, the Gulf of Mexico currently provides about 14% of all U.S. domestic output alone, but the Biden administration has done much to curtail it with regulations and new restrictions on drilling.

The energy industry has warned against any further restrictions as demand for oil and gas continues to remain high for the foreseeable future.

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Trump is expected to order a reversal of the protections upon his return to the White House, but he is likely to face opposition in the courts.

Previous administrations have modified decisions by their predecessors using the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to exempt areas from oil leasing, but so far the courts have yet to allow a complete reversal.

Trump’s attempt to revoke an Obama administration order to protect more than 125 million acres of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans during his first term, was rebuffed by a federal district court in 2019.

To better enable drilling, the President-elect is expected to rewrite Biden’s leasing restrictions using an administrative process that may take at least a year, while Republican lawmakers are also considering a bill to expand sales of offshore oil lease sales to raise revenue in the wake of planned tax cut extensions.