Race to the Bottom, Greased With Oil
Trump administration moves quickly to sell our public lands and waters to fossil fuel industry
The Trump administration is moving quickly and aggressively to give the oil industry control over our oceans and coastlines. It’s as if Trump and his team are trying to sell off as much of our public lands and waters as they can before they’re forced from office, cast out for corruption of one kind or another.
Today it’s the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where they just announced plans to invite drilling into that long-protected Alaska coastal plain. Last month it was the treacherous Arctic waters offshore of the refuge that were offered to oil companies, using an accelerated 30-day comment period for the Beaufort Sea that ends next week.
Past administrations have auctioned off offshore and coastal oil leases in batches. The Trump administration instead chooses to offer all the federal lands and waters that it can at once.
Last month it offered all available tracts in the Gulf of Mexico — 77 million acres, the largest offshore lease-sale in U.S. history. In December it was almost the entire National Petroleum Reserve, 10.3 million acres of Alaska’s northern frontier. Despite the reserve’s name, it’s a pristine wilderness that’s the home of the world’s largest caribou herds and flocks of migratory birds.
Luckily oil-industry interest lags behind this administration’s unrealistic ambitions. Less than 1 percent of the offerings in these two huge sales were snapped up for the lowest prices in years, with winning Gulf bids averaging $153 an acre, 35 percent below last year’s prices.
This isn’t the Art of the Deal; more like Art of the Steal. And it’s only going to get worse if the administration continues to sweeten the pot on this giveaway of our public lands and waters to the fossil fuel industry. It plans to expand offshore drilling into every U.S. ocean while scrapping important safety rules.
As we mark the eighth anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion, conservation groups are anxiously awaiting Trump’s announced rollback of offshore drilling safety regulations enacted after that disaster, the biggest, deadliest oil spill in U.S. history. And the bipartisan commission that investigated it has been warning against this administration’s aggressive, reckless approach.
“Expanding access to drilling is incredibly risky. Weakening vital safety standards is cause for even graver concern. But doing both at the same time? That’s a near-certain recipe for disaster,” commission member Terry Garcia, a former deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote in a guest editorial for USA Today this week.
Commission co-chairs Bob Graham and William Reilly warned Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke almost a year ago about the dangers of Trump’s plans: “The Commission members hold the unanimous view that weakening or rescinding the Well Control Rule would aggravate the inherent risks of offshore operations, put workers in harm’s way, and imperil marine waters in which drilling occurs.”
They also warned of the special risks posed by expanding drilling in remote Arctic regions, where harsh conditions and lack of nearby emergency resources would make a major oil spill impossible to contain and clean up. The Obama administration created special rules for drilling in the Arctic, which Trump is trying to rescind.
“The Commission looked specifically at the hazards in Arctic operations, and recommended several steps to ensure that the science of the Arctic was better known, that native communities were fully consulted, and that better investment in spill containment and response was required.
The President’s Executive Order fails to account for the vulnerabilities of frontier regions, the lack of adequate federal investment in safety for Arctic conditions, or the coastal economies along areas, including those along the Atlantic coast, that will be put at risk by this order,” they wrote.
But this administration is recklessly disregarding that good advice. So the clock is ticking as we all race toward the crossroads.
Will it give away our natural heritage to the oil industry, creating deadly oil spills and locking in climate chaos along the way? Or can we the people — through protests, lawsuits, voting and oversight from democratic institutions — thwart its plan and protect our public lands and waters?
