Guest “And just like that, it’s the Gulf of America” by David Middleton
BOEM’s Gulf of America OCS Region
Our mission: To manage development of U.S. Outer Continental Shelf energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way.
The Gulf of America Region (GOAR) manages three programs on the Gulf of America Outer Continental Shelf (OCS): oil and gas, renewable energy and marine minerals. The GOAR manages offshore resources in Federal waters off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Nearly three-fourths of the Gulf of America employees are scientists including geologists, geophysicists, petroleum engineers, physical scientists, biologists, environmental protection specialists, and environmental scientists.
What is the Gulf of America OCS?
The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) gives BOEM the authority to manage the OCS and the requirement to provide environmental oversight. The Gulf continues to be the nation’s primary offshore source of oil and gas, generating about 97% of all U.S. OCS oil and gas production. OCS activities generate substantial revenues from lease sales, royalties on production, and rental fees. These funds are distributed to the U.S. Treasury and several different programs through various revenue sharing laws. The largest portion goes to the General Fund of the U.S. Treasury, which benefits all U.S. citizens through funding of daily operations of the federal government.
BOEM held the first-ever offshore wind energy auction for the OCS Gulf of America region in 2023, resulting in one lease area receiving a high bid of $5.6 million. RWE Offshore US Gulf, LLC was the winner of the Lake Charles Lease Area, which has the potential to generate approximately 1.24 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity and power nearly 435,400 homes with clean, renewable energy.
The Marine Minerals Program partners with communities to address serious erosion along the Nation’s coastal beaches, dunes, barrier islands, and wetlands. Erosion affects natural resources, energy, defense, public infrastructure, and tourism. To help address this problem, the MMP leases sand, gravel and/or shell resources from federal waters on the OCS for shore protection, beach nourishment, and wetlands restoration with vigorous safety and environmental oversight.
More good news!
BOEM Rescinds Expanded Rice’s Whale Protection Efforts
Release Date 02/20/2025
Contact(s) Brian Walch
Phone (202) 710-7994
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) today announced it is rescinding its Notice to Lessees and Operators (NTL) 2023-G01, Expanded Rice’s Whale Protection Efforts During Reinitiated Consultation with NMFS [National Marine Fisheries Service]. The NTL contained recommendations for suggested precautionary measures by lessees and operators during the reinitiated consultation.
The NTL is being rescinded in response to Secretary’s Order 3418, Unleashing American Energy.
Information on NTLs is available at BOEM’s Guidance Portal: https://www.boem.gov/about-boem/regulations-guidance/guidance-portal.
— BOEM —
The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) manages development of U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way.
The Biden administration attempted to illegally remove the “Rice’s Whale Expanded Area” (dark blue area on map below) from all future, lease sales.
Rice’s whales are primarily located in the yellow and back outlined area in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, an area off-limits to oil & gas exploration. Prior to 2021, Rice’s whales were thought to be a local subpopulation of the unendangered Bryde’s whales.
The US offshore oil & gas industry has now been “un-Bidened by what” has been…
Biden: I Wanted ‘to Stop All Drilling’ on the Coasts and Gulf, Got Blocked by Courts
by IAN HANCHETT 8 Aug 2023
During an interview with The Weather Channel that is set to air on Wednesday, a portion of which aired on Tuesday, President Joe Biden said that he “wanted to stop all drilling on the East Coast and the West Coast and in the Gulf” but was blocked by the courts from doing so.
[…]
Breitbart
The court battles will continue. The Enviromarxist agitators are already forum and judge shopping to file more nuisance lawsuits in districts and before judges who have long track records of siding against industry and capitalism in general. However, unlike the past four years, the Federal government will be aggressively defending the law and we won’t have to rely on the API, NOIA, Louisiana and Chevron to fight back. We can only hope that the Supreme Court will finally figure out that these NGO’s do not have standing to sue anyone on behalf of the planet. The current Supreme Court might just be inclined to deny standing to the agitators.
Abstract
The topic of this article is not a happy one. Until very recently, the Court’s environmental rulings during the past five decades reflected the views of its consistently conservative majority, but were nonetheless tempered by moderate conservative Justices who, bounded by pragmatic concerns, were contextually open to account for the environmental protection exigencies present in particular cases. In the past few years, however, that dynamic has significantly shifted as the Court’s majority has increasingly been captured by Justices whom I dub “constitutional alarmists” — motivated in their votes and reasoning by their shared perception that environmental laws peculiarly threaten no less than the constitutional foundations of how law should be made and applied.
The purpose of this article is to describe this disturbing development while placing it in historical perspective. To that end, the article is divided into three parts. Part I highlights the central reason why environmental lawmaking is so challenging for our lawmaking institutions, including for the Supreme Court. As described in Part I, the making and application of environmental protection laws systematically present the Court with difficult questions regarding the Constitution’s allocation of lawmaking authority both between branches and between levels of government and the Bill of Rights’ imposition of limits on laws that interfere with personal liberty and private property. Part II considers how the Court generally resolved these legal issues over five decades from roughly October Term 1970, the dawning of modern environmental law in the United States, through the close of October Term 2019, immediately before President Trump added his third Justice to the Court. It describes how and why there was some modicum of balance in the Court’s environmental rulings during those five decades, notwithstanding a persistent conservative majority. Finally, Part III considers the Court’s environmental rulings since the fall of 2020, when the Court became dominated by six Justices who, alarmed by the threats they perceive environmental lawmaking to present to the Constitution’s very foundation, are joining majority opinions that unravel environmental law’s past successes and erode its future promise.
“Constitutional alarmists”? Don’t you just love it when smug leftists come up with phrases like “basket of deplorables” or “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”…
Thank you Professor Lazarus for adding “constitutional alarmists” to the left’s growing lists of unintentional compliments they’ve paid to hard working, patriotic Americans!. This deplorable garbage is now a proud constitutional alarmist! Having read pretty well all of the Federalist Papers penned by James Madison, I’m fairly certain that our Federal government was supposed to be operated by constitutional alarmists.
President Trump will likely have the opportunity to replace Justices Thomas (76) and Alito (74) with much younger “constitutional alarmists” (hopefully more like Gorsuch than Cavanaugh). He or his successor, J.D. Vance, might even get the opportunity to replace Justice Sotomayor (70) and Chief Justice Roberts (70).
Reference
Lazarus, Richard, The Rise of Constitutional Alarmists on the Supreme Court and Its Portent for the Future of Environmental Law 85 Ohio St. L. J. ____ (forthcoming 2024) (July 13, 2024). Harvard Public Law Working Paper Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4893459 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4893459
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Gulf of America is much more inclusive, after all!
Only if it were to be called the Gulf of North America. The US percentage of the Gulf of Mexico coastline is about 46%, while Mexico claims 49%.
You do want to be actually inclusive, don’t you?
I was being a bit satirical, but America covers North, Central, and South. Hard to be more inclusive without getting cumbersome. Gulf of Mexico was always somewhat possessive.
Ok, I’ll buy that and agree, since there’s really not a comparable gulf anywhere in South America.
But beware: that is not at all what Trump means by suggesting the rename.
To be sure, thus the satire.
Beware 😉
you are familiar with his thinking…got it
We have the English Channel, whereas France calls it La Manche. Then there’s the Irish Sea between the island of Ireland and the west coast of Wales, England and Scotland.
The French are wrong.
Usually
Sotomayor does have type I diabetes, so the chance to replace her might be sooner than her age would indicate.
The French have not got over the name English Channel and probably never will. In French, the English Channel is called “La Manche,” which translates to “the sleeve”
They are funny like that. And very sore losers….
King Charles was involved in a decision to change the name of a new royal submarine from HMS Agincourt to HMS Achilles, a move that was branded “woke nonsense” by former defence secretary Grant Shapps, the BBC has been told.
The name change was announced this week, and followed reports of concern within the Ministry of Defence that the original name for the vessel may have offended the French.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c86375y545yo
That would be like renaming USS Yorktown to USS Yorkshire Terrier to avoid insulting the British.
https://youtu.be/MfJb8hodhjs
(From the movie 1776)
You can’t insult us, we’ve been insulted by professionals.
South Koreans can’t stand the body of water to the east of them being called the “Sea of Japan”. I was working as a contractor there for a while and I was told by them to erase the term from a map that was being used as part of a military exercise. They call it the “East Sea”.
What was until recently called the Gulf of Mexico has been called many things by many people over the centuries. Even the Mexicans haven’t always called it the Gulf of Mexico.
The Dogger Littoral
Les Français ont tort.
Conversely, I cannot recall an example where the French have renamed something for fear of offending the English.
It’s been what, 900 years since the Battle of Agincourt? They still can’t let it go?
I approve a change but would have preferred:
Gulf of The Americas
After all the body is defined by the North, Central and South Americas.
Central American gulf?
No doubt the oil industry will have to pay for all the name changes on maps, documents, etc. Supreme Court must be reading all the marine science papers.
Serious comment follows no matter how flippant it may seem.
The “oil industry” goes to their GIS and changes a text field or six. This isn’t about scribes in towers laboring over parchments making changes with quills dipped in ink.
I do miss the good old days of rapidographs, ammonia paper and blueprint machines… /Sarc
Speaking of ammonia, the blueprint room of a large DOT facility was also famous for the size and quality of the plants grown in the south facing windows.
OMG flashback!
Your statement that “The ‘oil industry’ goes to their GIS and changes a text field or six” IS flippant.
So much for that suggestion serving the oil industry, but that industry does not exist in isolation (other than in a few heads that imagine it does, certain authors left unmentioned here):
— how about the aviation industry over and in the Gulf of Mexico?
— how about the marine cargo shipping and personal transportation industries in the Gulf of Mexico?
— how about the fishing and shrimping industry in the Gulf of Mexico
— how about search and rescue operations, such as the US Coast Guard, in the Gulf of Mexico?
— how about US Navy operations in the Gulf of Mexico?
— how about meteorology organizations and weather satellites that monitor and report about the Gulf of Mexico?
— how about cartologists?
— how about publishers of educational textbooks having references to Earth’s geographical features?
Just as there is a “web of life”, there is a “web of information”, and what affects one part affects the whole.
The Trump Gulf? 🙂
The “Trump Gulf” is that chasm twixt reality and the left.
Anyone know if there are any plans to open up the East Coast for exploration? Has anyone even done the seismic?
We drilled off the coast of Atlantic City with the Glomar Pacific in the Baltimore Canyon for Exxon in 1978 and there wasn’t much there. But that was before 3D and 4D seismic came along.
I doubt the states on the East Coast will cooperate and any effort to actually issue oil & gas leases will probably be tied up in court for years.
A lot of 2d seismic surveys were shot back in the 70’s and early 80’s. The Obama maladministration rejected permit requests to shoot modern 3d surveys back in 2017, 2 weeks before President Trump 45 was inaugurated….
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/09/boem-rejects-atlantic-gg-permits/
Tell them the data is needed for deep-seated windmills.
Perhaps underwater solar farms 🙂
Don’t forget all the energy available from the boiling oceans.
; >)
Yep, we can capture all the steam and spin turbine generators with it. sarc off 😉
With all the fish and crustaceans would also make a fantastic bouillabaisse.
From the above article’s lead-in sentence:
“And just like that, it’s the Gulf of America”
Hah! If only it were that easy.
The USA does not control the extent of the Gulf of Mexico, only the shorelines and “costal waters” bordering the states along the Gulf.
The agency primarily responsible for establishing names of geographical features around the world is the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), which operates under the United Nations and focuses on standardizing geographical names at both national and international levels.
UNGEGN has NOT issued any ruling that changes the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America”.
Since Trump is spouting such nonsense as this as if he were a world dictator, and since I’m not one of Trump’s sycophants or sheeple, and since I do believe in the rule of law, it’s still the “Gulf of Mexico” for me.
Get lost, stinking troll.
MC, got it!
Now, do you care to offer a sensible rebuttal, if you know what that means and requires?
BTW, your nose is too big.
Sensible, as in “dictator” and “sheeple”? Live by the sensible, die by the sensible.
This is a Trump troll. If you can change the name of Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and various other Forts; if you can force the change in names of Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians and various other college teams in order to be politically correct, then he can change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
I guess you missed the point about UNGEGN being responsible for standardizing the names of international geographical feature.
Or perhaps you missed me satirically pointing out that Trump acts like a world dictator when he asserts he can change the name of a place that is outside the boundaries of the United States?
All of the examples you gave are name changes of military installations and pro and college football teams within the USA. See the difference?
BTW, thank you for identifying yourself as a “Trump troll” in your very first sentence.
I guess you missed the point about nobody giving the slightest care for what any UN organization does, states, wants, wishes etc
I, for one, do care . . . so that immediately falsifies your assertion about “nobody giving the slightest care for what any UN organization does . . .”
But thank you providing this opportunity to point out some of reasons that other people around the planet probably likewise do care.
The United Nations and its integral Security Council have the authorizations, granted to them by member nations under the UN charter, as lawfully revised, to:
— maintain international peace and security: this is the UN’s primary mission, according to the UN Charter
— formalize, monitor, and enforce international law: the UN is responsible for international law
— settle legal disputes: the UN’s International Court of Justice settles legal disputes between member nations
— establish and maintain treaties mutually agreed among by member nations (e.g., the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 and many others tabulated at https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ParticipationStatus.aspx?clang=_en )
— issue sanctions: the UN Security Council can issue sanctions against member states
— order military action: the UN Security Council can order military action against aggressors
— assemble peacekeeping forces: the UN Security Council can assemble peacekeeping forces.
Strange, isn’t it, that co-President Donald Trump and co-President Elon Musk haven’t yet issued an EO to withdraw the USA from being a member of the UN if they don’t like or want to submit to the UN authorizations granted under its charter, most previously approved by the USA?
I suspect, but cannot prove, that Trump looks forward to giving some attention-grabbing pompous speeches in its Assembly Hall and that Musk doesn’t want to upset Tesla sales to foreign countries.
— maintain international peace and security: this is the UN’s primary mission, according to the UN Charter”
So… a complete failure. !!
Hah-ha! You need to look up and understand what the words “complete failure” means:
Examples of UN peacekeeping mission successes:
— Namibia: UN peacekeeping from 1989–1990
— Cambodia: UN Advance Mission in Cambodia (UNAMIC) from 1992–1993
— El Salvador: UN peacekeeping from 1991–1995
— Guatemala: UN peacekeeping in 1997
— Sierra Leone: UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) from 1999–2005
— Timor-Leste: UN peacekeeping from 1999–2002 and 2006–2012
— Liberia: UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) from 2003–2018
Took all of about one minute to find this information on the Web, but maybe you’re not familiar with doing such.
Aw shut up KnowItAll you miserable troll!
Get lost, smelly troll.
As I said before and above I’m no fan of the plethora of name changes mainly because of the trouble it causes. However, Seno Mexico was an early map name off their east coast. Seno is Spanish for bosom. Although they were the earliest claim (Vera Cruz, 1519 and Pineda outline map) the French didn’t think so and settled what is now Louisiana, failing in Texas. The Mississippi River is difficult to see without ships even with buoys and it took the French to map it properly although there may have been lost maps.
As for the Board of Geographic Names they changed St. Joseph’s Island on the central Texas coast to San Jose without a valid reason which they are supposed to have. Local myth is that it was political with the argument that Joseph was French and not Spanish, however, it appeared on early Spanish maps of the coast before Austin about 1830 cleared up the maps of central Texas islands. Still called St. Jo’s by us lazy folks.
Rather than “the Board of Geographic Names” that you mentioned, it was the State of Texas legislature that officially changed the name of St. Joseph’s Island to San Jose Island in 1973. No UN involvement at all in that!
They have no authority over anything.
https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/mandate/
And one more reason to DOGE the UN…
https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/sessions/4th_session_2025/
That’s a lot of words without anything being said one way or the other as what UNGEGN is actually authorized to do or prevented from doing, in terms of standardizing the naming of international geographical features.
Got anything better?
But, hey, if you want to assert there’s no need for standardizing such, then I’ll begin by renaming the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of Trump’s Head”.
Thanks for paving the way to that!
The words are from their website. They aren’t authorized to do anything but hold meetings and make suggestions.
That sounds like a very inefficient thing that should be corrected.
Where is Co-President Musk and DOGE when you need them? And shouldn’t we be out of the UN by now for this reason alone? After all, in 2024 the United States paid $1.54 billion to the UN’s regular budget and $1.37 billion to UN peacekeeping operations . . . think of the SAVINGS!
/sarc
Any oil & gas, other mineral, or wind leases issued in the US Gulf of America EEZ will come from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Gulf of America Region…
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/eez.html
Next you want former dudes playing girls and women’s sports?
OT.
But you really do
I can give you a formal diagnosis … TDS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome
Biden’s anti-drilling position is amazing to me. The report is from Aug 2023. I wonder when and how he acquired the green virus. I think his dementia settled in long ago, so he hasn’t understood the importance of oil to the nation, maybe since getting is 1967 Stingray. Consider Obama’s (disputed) assessment about Joe. And this one, apparently undisputed from 2020: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
As a longtime constitutional alarmist, I join you in welcoming more FF production in the Gulf of America!
In other news, I hear that Putin wants to get Exxon back into Russia and to get the sanctions lifted. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the War Whores push to topple Putin led to joint commercial development of Russia’s vast FF and mineral wealth! Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the GAE has been pushing for unipolar exploitation of Russian resources. Turns out all we had to do is ask nicely, and we might be able to share in the profits! Isn’t that something most children learn in kindergarten?
The need for a boogyman outweighs sensible notions.
I think you’ll find that few oil and gas companies are going to be in a hurry to invest in Russia, for a host of reasons. .
Good news about Rice’s Whales retraction. Never made sense
That pesky Constitution, drops a spanner in all their works.
Having worked in Houston it will remain USG or GoM for me.
Having worked the Gulf since 1988, I can assure you that the US portion of it is now the Gulf of America.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/gulf-america-oil/2025/02/15/id/1199241/