Time to Finish the Job
Our Atlantic waters are safe from oil and gas drilling for the next five years. Now President Obama should permanently protect the Atlantic and Arctic coasts.
The Obama administration stepped back from the brink on Tuesday, taking Atlantic waters off the table to oil and gas drilling for the next five years.
That’s a victory for this great ocean and all it sustains.
It takes leadership to stand up to the oil and gas lobby, listen to the voices of our coastal communities, and do what’s right for the American people by safeguarding Atlantic waters and shores against the risk of a BP-style disaster.
What’s needed now is for the administration to finish the job of protecting essential American waters and all they support by keeping oil and gas rigs out of Atlantic and Arctic waters — permanently.
That’s what it will take to safeguard both of these oceans and to defend future generations from the growing dangers of climate change. We can’t afford to lock our children into decades more of carbon pollution from burning these dirty fuels.
To set up rigs in those ocean waters that belong to all Americans, oil and gas companies must lease those areas from the federal government. Every five years, our government lays out the areas available in an offshore leasing plan.
In January, 2015, when the administration unveiled preliminary plans for the years 2017–2022, it proposed including Arctic and Atlantic waters, along with parts of the Gulf of Mexico that have long been available for oil and gas production.
East Coast communities were enraged by the threat of oil and gas drilling, which would expose the Eastern Seaboard to the kind of disaster the BP blowout brought to the Gulf Coast in 2010. That’s why more than a hundred municipalities and more than a thousand businesses went public to oppose offshore drilling, and the dangerous seismic blasting that precedes it, in the Atlantic.
The administration listened. It took Atlantic waters out of Tuesday’s revised proposal. There’s been no drilling in U.S. Atlantic waters since 1983; under Tuesday’s proposal, there will be none for at least the next five years.
Now, to keep the threat of future drilling from hanging over the region and its coastal residents, the president needs to exercise his executive authority to declare Atlantic waters off limits to drilling for all time.
He should do the same for the Arctic Ocean, parts of which would be available for oil and gas leasing under the proposal the administration put forth on Tuesday. That would take us in the wrong direction. It would put some Arctic waters and all they support at grave and needless risk. It would feed our reliance on the dirty fuels of the past just as we’re beginning an essential shift to cleaner, smarter ways to power our future. And it would saddle our children with a new generation of the dangerous carbon pollution that’s driving global climate change.
Fortunately, there’s time to turn back this triple threat to the planet before it’s too late. The public has 90 days to comment on the latest proposals before the administration works out its final plan.
That means we have 90 days to stand up, speak out, and let our leaders know we won’t sit idly by and watch our waters turned to wasteland at the hands of industrial profiteers.
Tuesday’s proposal would allow Arctic Ocean drilling in three areas: one each in the Chukchi Sea, the Beaufort Sea and Cook Inlet. The proposal, though, also includes an alternative approach: no Arctic leases. That’s the way we need to go, and NRDC will work hard to press for that solution.
We’ve got to act to save the Arctic Ocean — and we’ve got to do it now.
One of the last great ocean frontiers on earth, Arctic waters are home to a rich web of marine and animal life, from the tiniest plankton to the largest bowhead whale. Caribou, polar bears, and walruses depend on healthy Arctic waters, ice, and coasts. And the waters of the region play a global role in oceanic and atmospheric currents and climate.
The region presents special hazards as well: gale-force winds that can churn up waves as tall as a three-story building, pack ice that chokes passage of ships eight months out of the year, wind-chill temperatures that fall to 10 below zero by late September.
The industry itself has proved it’s no match for the harsh yet fragile Arctic. Four years ago, Shell Oil lost control of a drilling rig that crashed into rocks and required a Coast Guard rescue. Just last summer Shell suspended exploratory drilling in Arctic waters, after encountering even more problems there.
As the industry’s own record has shown, it lacks the ability to prevent, contain or clean up an oil spill should a blowout or rupture occur. Oil, unfortunately, travels well in water — up to many hundreds of miles. Drilling in parts of the Arctic Ocean poses a threat to all of it.
It doesn’t take a blowout, for that matter, to do lasting damage to our oceans. The underwater seismic testing that precedes drilling can do lethal harm over great distances to dolphins, whales and other marine life, impairing the natural ability of some of the most majestic creatures on earth to navigate, protect their families and find food.
And this is important: The industry envisions tapping the oil in those waters two, three, even four decades from now.
Seriously? The National Research Council tells us that, by 2050, we can cut oil consumption in our cars by 80 percent and the U.S. Department of Energy says we can get 80 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources like the wind and sun. We need to focus on hitting those targets, not shackling our kids and grandkids to untold decades more of fossil fuel hazard and harm.
The best science tells us we can’t uncork the carbon pollution that would come from burning Arctic oil and gas without consigning future generations to an unlivable world. Last year was the hottest since global record keeping began in 1880. Nineteen of the hottest years on record have all occurred in the past two decades. We have to turn away from the fossil fuels that are driving climate change and find cleaner, smarter ways to power our future.
That’s the vision the entire world agreed to — with Obama in the lead — last December in Paris, where the United States, China, India and more than 180 other countries put plans on the table to cut or curb our fossil fuel use. The message of Paris was clear: the future belongs to those who invest in new ways to do more with less waste and get more clean power from renewable sources like the wind and sun. That’s the direction Obama is moving us toward through the historic Clean Power Plan he introduced last summer to help clean up our dirty power plants.
And that’s the kind of future he and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau affirmed last week at the White House, when they pledged to become clean energy partners, work to protect the vast reaches of Arctic waters and lands the two countries share, and only approve commercial activity there that comports with their mutual climate goals.
Drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean expressly fails that test.
We’ve got a bright future before us — across our country and around the world. We can power that future without putting the planet in peril. And we can create entire new industries that usher in generations of jobs, prosperity, and growth. It starts by standing up to speak the truth. We’re not stuck with fossil fuels and all the hazard and harm they bring — and neither are our children.
Please join me in telling the administration you believe in the power of American progress. You believe in the power of change. And you expect our leaders to protect our future by taking Arctic and Atlantic waters off the table to oil and gas drilling — for good.
Urge President Obama to put Arctic and Atlantic waters off-limits to oil and gas drilling — permanently.
