President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday again blasted the Biden administration’s withdrawal of millions of acres of federal waters from oil and gas leasing and said he would try to pull the plug on new wind power developments.
Speaking at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said President Joe Biden’s move to withdraw 625 million acres of federal waters off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and the eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico from future consideration of oil leasing would cost the country at least $50 trillion. Trump did not say how he calculated that number, and there is currently no oil and gas drilling in the areas Biden withdrew.
“It feels like the whole ocean,” Trump said of the withdrawal of the areas off the U.S. coastline. “Nobody else does that. I’m going to have it revoke on Day One.”
However, Trump may find it difficult to quickly undo Biden’s action, since an attempt by his previous administration to undo a similar prohibition was blocked by a federal judge in 2019.
