So what happened to that goodwill promise President Joe Biden made in the White House Rose Garden on Nov. 7 to do everything he can to support an orderly transition to the upcoming Trump administration?
Calling on people to bring down the temperature after the heat of the presidential campaign, he said, “We accept the choice the country made. I’ve said many times, you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”
The gap here between generous words and consequential deeds is expansive.
Recognizing that the Trump campaign put a return to energy affordability, reliability, and independence a front and center priority, just two weeks before White House keys are turned over to freshly inaugurated President Donald Trump, outgoing Biden invoked a permanent ban on oil and gas leasing over an incredibly vast expanse covering 625 million acres of offshore waters surrounding the country.
If allowed to stand, this action taken in accordance with an arcane 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, will essentially remove the entire Atlantic Coast, eastern Gulf of Mexico, the West Coast and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from future exploration, development, or production.
Congress’s goal in passing the legislation was to promote more domestic oil and gas development while also preserving a president’s discretion over private leasing to set aside certain federal waters for conservation subject to time limits … not to stave off climate change or transition to “clean energy” as Biden’s ban offers as justification.
President-elect Trump's spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, called Biden’s action “a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices.”
Although incoming President Trump pledged at a news conference to “revoke the offshore oil, gas drilling ban on day one,” Reuters advises that legally doing so will likely require action by the new GOP majority Congress, and in any case will involve a blizzard of contested lawsuits.
Trump’s “drill, baby drill” priority also includes reopening oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a policy of his first office term that was ended by the Biden administration.
The Trump administration approved a large Alaska ConocoPhillips Willow drilling project at the tail end of the former president's term, but it was subsequently blocked by a judge for further review.
The Biden administration later authorized the Willow project in response to a 2023 court order, a decision that came a day after it had restricted offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and barred development in 13 million acres of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve.
Meanwhile, the Biden White House has endorsed a total of only three offshore allowances in the Gulf of Mexico for 2025, 2027 and 2029 under a five-year Democrat drilling plan authorized by Congress in 2023 as a condition for expanding offshore wind development.
Under the terms of a 2022 climate law passed after months of contentious Senate trade-off wrangling, the government must offer at least 60 million acres of offshore oil and gas leases in any one-year period before it can offer offshore wind leases.
A Trump presidency and GOP-majority Congress will decisively tip the calculus of that energy policy trade-off in favor of drilling.
Recently speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump criticized wind industry reliance on government subsidies and high production costs stating: “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built … they don’t work without subsidy, you don’t want energy that needs subsidy.”
Trump added that windmills are “littered all over the country” and benefit only those profiting from the subsidies.
Although the former and soon-to-be next president pledged back in May to end offshore wind production by executive order on his first day in office, his latest comments appear to include halting onshore projects as well.
And while Trump cannot directly prevent wind farms from being built on private lands, he could phase out production tax credits, a key government subsidy for private wind projects.
Donald Trump isn’t wind energy’s only opponent and critic.
Local governments, including over 400 counties, have blocked new wind and solar projects over environmental and public nuisance concerns through bans, moratoriums, construction limits and other policies that make new plants difficult to finance or build.
As for the end game, don’t bet against a return of President Trump’s affordable, reliable, U.S. emergency independence policies ultimately winning out over costly, inflationary climate-alarm-driven green dreams.
Democrats are well advised to seriously heed the public mandate evidenced in Trump’s landslide election as a wakeup call to cut repeat losses in Congressional midterms.
But then again, don’t necessarily encourage them to do so.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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