President Obama’s decision to forbid oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States waters in the Arctic is in itself a spectacular environmental gift, offering protection to what he accurately described as a “sensitive and unique ecosystem that is unlike any other region on earth.”
It also adds one more chapter, though probably not the last, to the administration’s eight-year record of rebalancing the scale between the conservation of natural resources and their exploitation. And it sharpens an already glaring contrast between Mr. Obama and his successor, Donald Trump, who on the basis of his cabinet appointments alone seems hellbent on reviving the “drill, baby, drill” sensibilities of the George W. Bush administration.
The White House announcement was coordinated with similar steps announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. Neither announcement affects state-owned waters along the coasts, but together they will shield nearly all of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas north of Alaska from drilling.
Mr. Obama based his decision on a provision in the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs oil and gas activities in federal waters. The provision gives a president unilateral authority to “withdraw from disposition” any unleased lands on the shelf. Despite Senator Ted Cruz’s complaint that this was simply one more “Obama abuse of power,” the provision, though rarely used, goes back as far as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who used it to protect the reefs off Key Largo, and has since been invoked by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Mr. Obama previously used it to bar drilling in the rich fishing grounds of Alaska’s Bristol Bay and parts of the Bering Sea.
Echoing Mr. Cruz, the American Petroleum Institute denounced the decision as a threat to “our national security and vital, good-paying job opportunities.” Here again there was little grasp of history or reality. After spending $7 billion, suffering one farcical accident after another at sea and coming up mostly dry in the one hole it drilled, Shell Oil announced in September 2015 that it was shelving any further plans to drill on its remaining lease in the Chukchi Sea. That lease, and 42 leases in the Beaufort Sea that cover about 200,000 acres, will not be affected by the Obama announcement. But industry as a whole, chastened by Shell’s example, seems totally uninterested in the Arctic at a time when oil prices are falling and new discoveries are occurring in far less forbidding environments.
For good measure, Mr. Obama also announced a drilling ban in a string of deepwater canyons in the Atlantic stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia that are home to rare corals and many fish species. This, too, is consistent with the administration’s efforts over the years to protect delicate environments deemed too wild, or too precious, to exploit. Since 2009, Mr. Obama’s interior secretaries, first Ken Salazar and now Sally Jewell, have used various legal authorities to block drilling or mining near national parkland in Utah, around the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, in Wyoming’s Rocky Mountain Front and near the Boundary Waters wilderness in Minnesota.
Whether Mr. Trump will seek to reverse these initiatives remains to be seen. It takes a certain set of values to put environmental protections over economic uses, and so far these values are not much in evidence in Mr. Trump or his designated administrators.
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