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| President Biden this week announcing a ban on oil drilling in much of the offshore waters around the United States. |
The move was an effort to at least throw a monkey wrench in incoming President Donald Trump's plans to, as he puts it, drill, baby drill.
Climate change is part of Biden's motivation for this. "As the climate crisis continued to threaten communities across the countermand we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren," he said.
Biden's move was also probably prodded by his memories of the big oil spill along the beaches of Santa Barbara, California in January, 1969.
".....drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation's energy needs," Biden said in a statement.
Biden's acton will at least delay the offshore part of incoming President Trump's climate-denying drill baby drill approach to fossil fuel extraction.
Trump continues to cling to the notion that climate change is a hoax, and that clean energy is basically worthless, so we have to keep burning fossil fuel. His brain hasn't really left the 1950s. And besides, the United States has never produced as much oil as we do now, even with efforts to transform to a "clean energy economy."
For his part, Trump said he would end Biden's drilling ban on "day one."
"I will unban it immediately," Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, "I have the right to unban it."
Actually, he doesn't.
According to the Associated Press, Biden's authority to enact this ban is under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which allows the president to protect offshore areas. Once a president does what Biden has done, an act of Congress is needed to undo it.
It's a Republican Congress full of Trump fanboys and girls, so no doubt they'll do the deed, but it will take a lot more longer to complete than it say, the act of throwing ketchup against a White House wall.
Environmentalists were strangely elated at this development, considering the Republican Congress will get rid of this order soon enough. A for instance from the AP: "This is an epic ocean victory!" said Joseph Gordon, campaign director for the environmental group Oceana.
For a little while, anyway.
As NPR explains, much of the ocean territory where Biden banned new drilling is not of immediate interest to oil companies, except for an area they're salivating over in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
Still, the ever-present American Petroleum Institute, who spent last week throwing darts at Vermont's climate superfund law, are in a bit of a snit over Biden's move.
"American voters sent a clear message in support of domestic energy development, and yet the current administration is using its final days in office to cement a record of doing everything possible to restrict it," American Petroleum Institute president Mike Sommers said in a statement.
Or did voters actually send that "clear message?"
Trump clearly won the election, but in the popular vote it was only a 49-48 split in the percentages. And I didn't see any polling during the election in which there was a huge groundswell of Americans demanding new drilling.
Sure, nobody wants to pay an arm and a leg for gasoline, or fuel oil, and I suppose increased domestic production would help tamp prices down. Though it's a global market, so world events could upset that anti-inflationary setup no matter how much oil the United States pumps out of the ground.
Besides, at last check, the United States was producing more crude oil than any other nation at any time, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Given that fact it will be hard for Trump to increase oil production beyond where we're already at.
Trump thinks his efforts will cut energy costs in half for consumers. That's a tall order, but he doesn't have a great track record of following through with his promises anyway, so take that with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, we're cranking out the oil and burning it up and making climate change worse and thus making disasters worse and making the world a more difficult place in which to live.
Trump wants to make the U.S. dominant, all right. One of the main things we might well be dominate at is making the most destructive contributions to climate change of any nation in the world.
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