The tide is turning against our oceans
Trump administration creating, not mitigating threats
On Saturday, June 9th — World Oceans Day — more than 3,000 people demonstrated outside the White House, calling on the federal government to protect our waters. In addition to that March for the Ocean, more than 100 other rallies took place across the United States, as well as in countries in Asia, Oceania, South America and Europe.
The March called for stopping offshore oil drilling, reducing the massive influx of plastics into our oceans, and protecting and restoring coastlines.
World Ocean Day held more significance this year. Since the Trump administration took office last year, it has proposed reversing decades of bipartisan work on preserving our oceans, our marine life, and our coastal economies.
Earlier this year, the Department of the Interior announced that it would open up to 90 percent of U.S. coastal waters for oil and gas exploration and drilling leases. Offshore coastal waters are managed by a Five Year Plan. While the most recent Five Year Plan protected the entire Atlantic Coast, the Pacific Coast, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the vast majority of the Alaskan coast, those protections are now in jeopardy. Even though this is only year two of the current Five Year Plan, the Trump administration has announced its intent to rewrite and reissue it, and allow oil and gas companies almost unencumbered access to approximately 90% of our coastal waters, in the largest expansion of offshore drilling in US history.
The announcement was met with fierce opposition from both sides of the aisle, up and down the coasts.
“The irreversible impact on ecosystems including marine mammals, fish, sea turtles, and other aquatic life that inhabit the ocean offshore is gravely concerning, as is potential risk and harm to our state’s economies, our natural resources, our military installations, and our residents,” a bipartisan group of six Atlantic Coast governors wrote in a letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. In addition, all three Pacific Coast governors expressed their strong opposition to drilling off of their coasts.
Despite that dissent, the Trump administration is drafting a leasing plan that we could see as soon as fall of 2018.
Opening up our coastal waters to oil drilling isn’t the only way the Trump administration is reversing our progress on oceans. In the middle of June — National Ocean Month no less — Pres. Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that essentially rewrote former Pres. Barack Obama’s National Ocean Policy (NOP). The emphasis on maintaining federal leadership while cooperating with states and tribes to address threats to the oceans is gone. In addition, key passages on maritime climate resilience, on marine ecosystem restoration, and on ocean acidification are missing.
In the words of the former Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Jane Lubchenko, “The Trump policy represents a significant step backward — a throwback to the 1960s, when the primary focus was on aggressively expanding the use of the ocean with the assumption that it is so immense, so bountiful, that it must be inexhaustible.”
Contrary to the previous forward-looking and cooperative NOP, the new policy focuses on resource extraction, economic and security concerns, and abdicates federal leadership in favor of local direction, with little regard to environmentally-sensitive ecosystems, marine wildlife, or climate concerns.
While the Trump administration inexplicably rushes to re-embrace the outdated energy of the last century, clean renewables have become more abundant. A new report from Bloomberg energy shows that global wind and solar will comprise nearly 50 percent of global energy production by the year 2050. Expanding oil drilling in sensitive coastal waters makes no sense when the required resources would be more effectively used to produce clean energy. Given the increased availability and efficiency of renewable energy production and storage, we should be weaning ourselves off oil, not looking for more of it, especially near communities that say they don’t want oil and gas exploration near their shores.
Even though National Ocean Month has come to a close, we should still focus on how much our planet depends on our sensitive marine ecosystems remaining healthy, and how much our coastal communities depend on clean oceans.
Organizers are already planning the next March for the Ocean. Keep an eye out for the date, and please join us. We should all do our part to keep our oceans free from oil rigs and plastic debris.
