Nick Pope
Contributor
President Joe Biden is reportedly preparing to restrict offshore oil and gas drilling in his final days in office, a move that would placate the environmentalist lobby and potentially obstruct President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to unleash the U.S. energy sector, according to Bloomberg News.
Biden’s reportedly forthcoming order would permanently ban new lease sales for oil and gas drilling in certain regions of the outer continental shelf, according to Bloomberg News, which cited anonymous sources familiar with the situation. Some elected Democrats and many well-funded green groups have pushed Biden to implement permanent environmental policies in the waning days of his presidency to fluster Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.
While the scope of the order is currently unclear, there have been internal discussions about targeting certain areas off the coast of California and in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Bloomberg News. It is also unclear when the administration will announce the policy, though it could be within a matter of days. (RELATED: White House Touts Support Of Confrontational Enviro Group That Harassed Admin Officials, Dems)
President Joe Biden waves to the press as he walks
While many of the Biden administration’s energy policies will be relatively easy to reverse, the reportedly forthcoming offshore drilling decree will be permanent and “difficult-to-revoke” because it is enabled by a law that permits presidents to protect federal waters from drilling without clearly allowing them to walk back prior designations, according to Bloomberg News. Still, Trump could try to roll back Biden’s order, though it is not clear whether or not he would be successful. The offshore protections are clearly at odds with Trump’s campaign promise to unshackle and unleash the U.S. energy sector.
The Biden administration also worked to reduce offshore oil and gas activity by issuing the most restrictive five-year leasing schedule in modern history in 2023.
The lame duck administration has also been working to finalize climate policies and disburse funding for various green initiatives in the wake of the election, doing things like blocking oil and gas development in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains for 20 years and finalizing massive taxpayer-funded loans for green energy companies.
The White House did not respond immediately to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Biden won’t be doing anything but doing as he’s told signing off whatever his puppeteers put in front of him in between naps.
The man is no longer competent to manage a Beach Chair let alone sign his name to any legislation not passed by Congress first. Anything he does could likely be swiftly overturned simply by questioning his mental acuity.
Nope. Joe Biden has not been declared to be incompetent under the 25th Amendment. Regardless of how he got there, Biden was administered the oath of office on January 20th, 2021, and is therefore the legal president of the United States.
It is likely Biden’s Executive Order will stand until new legislation can reverse the law which prevents a future president from reversing Biden’s decision on offshore leasing with his/her own executive order.
Anything enacted by Executive Order can be Overwritten by Executive Order as well as the Legislative Branch. Anything enacted by the Legislative Branch cannot be overwritten by ExO but takes a subsequent act of Congress or a ruling by SCOTUS
That should be the case, but during Trump’s first term, the courts blocked him from over turning a number of Obama executive orders. I don’t remember the excuse
Not a lawyer, but throwing this out for consideration. Biden has been found (at least likely to be) incompetent in a federal investigation/by a federal investigator, at least informally if not legally, when they declined to prosecute him because he was likely unable to defend himself (or whatever the silly reason was).
The Dem’s play hardball. they use lawfare and play for keeps. it’s about time the other side did the same thing. I think claiming Biden was determined to be incompetent by a federal prosecutor and reversing the order and forcing the left to sue could at least set up an interesting legal dilemma. Either he’s found incompetent and therefore the reversal is allowed to stand, or he is found competent and the decision to prosecute him for corruption could be revisited.
Watching the Trumpists heads explode during the peaceful transition of power is highly amusing
Trump himself signed 14 executive orders the day before leaving office. Thats right all 14 for Jan 2021 were signed on 19th Jan when he finally “woke up” that he wasnt going to continue
https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders/donald-trump/2021
Your TDS slip is showing.
We agree, he has dementia.
I’m not an American, so please bear with my ignorance on this, but how can Biden issue a permanent ban that is clearly not in the interests of the US?
Could not the Trump admin rewrite the law and pass it? They have the numbers to do so.
How about because nowhere in the US constitution does it say that only actions that are done in the best interests of the country are legal? Or alternatively different people have different sincerely held views about what is in the best interests of a country.
And the republicans do not seem to have the numbers or the will to make any significant changes to laws. In Congress they have a very small majority and barely ever do all Republicans vote the same way on anything so passing anything is going to be a challenge while in the Senate they don’t have 60 seats meaning that very few bills can be passed unless the democrats agree and don’t filibuster.
You’re probably pretty close to being correct but I donwvoted you for being a general d*ck. Mary Jones asked a legitimate question and admitted she was not familiar with the American legal system. The tone of your response was not informative, but that of a jerk.
And if it is found (can be proven) to be in “The Best Interests of the country” to rescind ALL Biden Policies and Executive Orders then So Be It. Right??
Why do democrats love war? I bet you cheered as Obama droned brown people in the Middle East 🧐
Trump has issued his own offshore bans …heard of the coast near Mar a Lago. Yes Florida has Waiver. Drilling for thee but not for me
Florida law banned offshore drilling decades ago. It had nothing to do with Trump.
Florida law doesn’t extend into offshore economic zone. That’s federal jurisdiction only. He did it by executive order just before 2020 election. Or does Florida law overide executive orders……LOL
Reminded me that offshore wind is not a new idea – I hazily recall there were supposed to be offshore windmills on Cape Cod Massachusetts in the early 1990s that got canned because they were too near Kennedy properties.
It’s like Gavin’s mask policy for the French Laundry.
From the little I have read, the law has a clause that allows the president to restrict some drilling but has no wording about revoking that restriction. Liberals say that this is a Santa clause gift to them which makes the restriction permanent. One could certainly argue that the lack of such wording doesn’t prevent a retraction. President Trump could write an EO to retract it, and then likely fight it out in the courts. A new law could also be written and passed, but that would take time and political efforts which could delay other actions.
And another thing – it’s always struck me as weird that the new president only gets to take over 2 months after he’s elected. Here in the UK, the losing Prime Minister is out of 10 Downing Street pretty well as soon as the results are in.
Perhaps some of our US friends can enlighten me?
I wish there would be a way to memorialize this so that future voters will see the vindictiveness and the utter hatred of humanity and human flourishing by the Party. When they say “Biden” they mean the unelected sociopathic Deep State and their tentacles within the Executive.
What I find odd is that there is a Roach Hotel law that allows any lame-duck president to incumber their successors with arbitrary non-legislative impediments that can be enacted by the Executive but require courts a/o the Legislative Branch to remove.
It must be located somewhere in the Constitution’s fine print.
“Definition: To incumber (commonly spelled encumber) means to place a burden or obstacle on real property. Example: If a person takes out a mortgage on their house, they are incumbering the property. This means that the lender has a legal claim on the property until the mortgage is paid off.”
I was going to say incumber->encumber, but it works both ways. +1 for defeating grammar trolls.
The executive order is rooted in the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a 72-year-old law that grants the White House broad authority to permanently protect U.S. waters from oil and gas leasing.
Crucially, this law does not explicitly empower future presidents to revoke such designations.
This situation mirrors a previous legal battle during Trump’s first term. In 2019, Trump attempted to revoke former President Barack Obama’s order that protected over 125 million acres of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from drilling. However, this attempt was rejected by a federal district court.
The lack of explicit revocation authority in the law has led to legal uncertainty and debate over whether a subsequent president can undo such protections. This legal ambiguity is precisely what Biden is leveraging to create a more enduring environmental legacy as he prepares to leave office.
While Trump is expected to challenge these protections upon taking office, the success of such a challenge remains uncertain due to this legal precedent. This strategy by the Biden administration aims to create a significant hurdle for Trump’s stated goal of expanding domestic energy production.
https://worldoil.com/news/2025/1/2/biden-moves-to-ban-more-offshore-drilling-in-final-weeks-in-white-house/
FJB and his lickspittle acolytes.
I expect AG Bondi to expedite this to Scotus where a new precedent is likely to be set. i.e. omissions of revokation clauses do not automatically grant impervious perpetuity.
National security seems to be invoked all the time for Dems to bypass or ignore laws or the constitution. Not sure how that would play out, but couldn’t the incoming Trump administration declare it a national security issue? at the very least it could set up an interesting legal battle and maybe achieve some clarification (then again, maybe not),
‘The lack of explicit revocation authority in the law has led to legal uncertainty and debate over whether a subsequent president can undo such protections.’
I think a lot of folks are going to be puzzled re. how such a statute could pass Constitutional muster. They should look no further than the outcome of the bizarre Carolene Products case to fully understand that the US Supreme Court long ago signed-on to the idea that our Federal government can do anything it wants to us within the realm of economic activity.
And pretty much every action has economic consequences.
Maybe Trump could ban new offshore wind farms, unless they are within 3 miles of Martha’s Vineyard and a certain beach in Delaware.
Already done that. Just before the 2020 election Trump extended the bans off the atlantic coast of republican states…..and his own beach estate
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/08/reversal-trump-ban-oil-drilling-off-coasts-florida-georgia-south-carolina/
Read Magnuson’s comment again. You got overly excited and misread it.
Ducks TDS slip is showing
You misread. That was a maybe.
Trump actually banned. New drilling and windfarms in republican states….the whole coastline
Place a few, 800-ft monsters in the surf off the beach of Biden’s house.
There they would kill no whales, plus the visuals and flicker and infrasound would be unbearable on the beach and his house.
Wishing him and his Democrat neighbors great stays for decades, courtesy of heavily subsidized EUROPEAN developers of wind turbine projects in the US
Trump has a beach front house too….. no drilling nor wind farms on his coast line
Tell me, does your hatred of Trump always cause you to make a fool of yourself?
D’s comment acknowledges that drilling or wind farms devalue coast line property.
Is that a reference to the Kennedy property or the Obama property?
With Ted gone and Robert swapping sides I wonder if the Kennedy’s are still a thing up there. They were a big enough deal that the park over what was called Boston’s multibillion dollar “Big Dig” project is named after … their mom.
Perhaps he should make use of them to protect the same tracts of (Land) Ocean from the ravages of Offshore Wind Energy Mining.
OUr federal governlment cannot afford to be wasting money like this. Their debt is just too high. Such expetures need to be stopped becuse the federal just does not have the money for this.
How does not drilling waste money? It reduces expenditure since drilling is expensive and usually unsuccessful. Of course it might also reduce income from rent but that is a different thing.
Because drilling brings in large incomes, dopey !
Also the drilling money spent is not Federal money.
The REAL waste is on the unsustainable renewable crap which not only costs the subsidies, but provides absolutely zero Federal income, while destroying the stability of the grid and forcing electricity prices up, putting financial pressure on manufacturing, business and domestic consumers.
.
Not drilling has increased energy costs which in turn makes everything more expensive. These leftists have no economic sense.
Under Biden, the US fossil fuel production has increased every year and has exceeded the national demand. The reason for rising energy costs has nothing to do with a lack of drilling.If the US hadn’t removed the ban on exporting oil in 2015 prices would be falling rather than rising.
You are right. Rising energy costs have nothing to do with a lack of drilling.
Rising energy costs have everything to do with the proliferation of extremely costly “Cheap Renewable” energy, the Guaranteed Government Subsidy payments and the “Take or Pay” government mandate for ruinable energy providers.
It is actually much worse.
As you add more wind and solar systems, those systems, as a group, become less productive, plus the traditional power plants, as a group, also become less productive.
The net result is an increase in installed wind/solar capacity, an increase in the use of fuel, but no increase of electricity delivered to customers, because those customers are “conserving”, plus the electricity that is delivered becomes much more expensive, and would be even more expensive, if multi-$billion/y subsidies were taken away.
Hey, dumb*ss, exploration and drilling is done by PRIVATE companies (or publicly owned ones). Since the government doesn’t drill it doesn’t reduce expenditures. Oh, and you just conveniently gloss over the fact that the government makes a lot of money off of royalties, not to mention all the follow-on taxes (business taxes, payroll taxes, taxes on gasoline and other petroleum products, etc.).
In Izaak’s ideal world, all these oil companies would be owned by the government.
Outside of government, nobody drills holes in the ground without an expectation of earning a return.
Perhaps if you gave it some thought, you’d realize that the standard for what constitutes a ‘successful’ drilling program is better left to those who are willing to risk their own capital, rather than people like you who are inclined to squander scarce resources coercing the activities of others.
How exactly does not drilling and thus not using fossil fuels squander a
scarce resource? It would appear to be the exact opposite. Alternatively if
you want to talk about squandering resources the oil and gas industry flare
about 140 billion cubic metres of gas every year. Which if used could supply
much of the energy needs of Africa for example.
Izaak, I know that you have a habit of saying stupid things, but this one is one of your biggest.
The federal government does not do the drilling.
It leases the right to drill to private companies.
Do you not believe that these leases provide money to the federal government?
A leftist and their brain are soon parted.
Charles,
You write about restricting drilling to placate the environmental lobby.
To me, as a former “drill, baby, drill” practitioner, the link between stopping drilling and pleasing greens is both illogical and invalid. Yet, many people in the community seem to think (unthinkingly) that green policies are automatically good for the environment. This feeling, stemming maybe from R Carson’s Silent Spring of 1962 when goodness was strongly linked to greenness. Since then, it has been shown many times that the only green weapon is prevention of normal acts. This often denies income to those prevented and eventually to the whole of society. So what is to like?
Can I suggest to readers that 2025 onwards is the time to break the link between greenness and goodness, which is dominantly an obscene product of big money spent on advertising. Geoff S
It’s also been shown that “Silent Spring” was a work of fiction, not science.
Donald J Biden also blocked offshore drilling ….along Florida coast
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/asia-pacific/reversing-course-ahead-of-election-trump-extends-drilling-ban-off-florida-idUSKBN25Z2TY/
The period of change over between the Presidential election and the inauguration, should be a joint decision period, It should not be a time where a bitter outgoing President is allowed to adopt a scorched earth policy of destruction for three final months. The spite and harm to the nation being progressed by the Democrat administration will continue through to January 20th they have no shame.
A smooth “transition of power.”
Hello ?
Did you know Trump signed 19 executives orders the day BEFORE Biden assumed office
https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders/donald-trump/2021
What if the incumbent team suspects they will lose -before- the election?
A decree by a mentally handicapped president? That must be unconstitutional.
Just watching the Trumpists heads explode as Biden peacefully hands over power is a sight to behold
Reagan?
Figured it would be unpopular to throw rocks at a conservative legend, but toward the end he reputedly had very bad short term memory. Honesty.
Trump should just do it. The warmunists will sue, it will go to the Federal courts, and SCOTUS will eventually decide. In the meantime it is likely that, because the new restrictions are new and a change from status quo, the Trump administration will have a good argument for an injunction staying the new restrictions using the Chevron ruling that Congress never intended that once restricted, the Federal waters can never be unrestricted – which makes no governing sense whatsoever. Ergo, Trump will be likely to succeed in reversing the rules at SCOTUS.
Besides, Biden did not go through the full Administrative Procedures Act process for creating new rules, which is a violation of Federal law.
Whilst Biden’s hand will be on the pen, I wonder who’s, will actually be guiding it?
Post your thoughts below.
Bama…..
Too many choices to list.
H. CLinton
N. Pelosi
G. Soros
UN
Just a short sampling.
Or maybe all of them, that would be a hoot to watch.
Time for pugil sticks and moats of Lava
(Biden is now, at this point in time, so far gone that he can’t even screw up on his own)
I want to know who is the specific individual that is the go-between … the connection in the White House that is the point man for Soros/Jarret.
Or is it simply Biden saying, “what else can I do … somebody get me a list grand (dumb-ass) actions I can pull off here at the end.” And then some low-end staffer grabs the portfolio of harmful actions that was provided during one of the Soros visits, and gives Biden 3 choices of dumb-assery to choose from.
dimwitted and evil. Thay always seem to go together.