Conservation groups are heading to federal court in defense of former President Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour executive order permanently withdrawing millions of acres of offshore federal waters from oil and gas development.
The Northern Alaska Environmental Center and others are suing to block what they call President Donald Trump’s “unconstitutional” Jan. 20 executive order reversing drilling protections for waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, which Trump has renamed the Gulf of America. The restrictions also apply to parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and some of Alaska’s coastline.
“Trump’s putting our oceans, marine wildlife and coastal communities at risk of devastating oil spills and we need the courts to rein in his utter contempt for the law,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “Offshore oil drilling is destructive from start to finish.”
Monsell said that opening up additional public waters to the oil industry “for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems.”
