When President Trump boldly announced that he was going to expand oil drilling off coastlines across the United States, including California’s, he drew cheers from the oil industry and dread from environmentalists and coastal tourism leaders.
Two years later, his plans for new drilling are hitting a potentially fatal setback: Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats who now control the House of Representatives.
On Thursday, in an obscure, but key, vote, the House voted to adopt several amendments to the Department of Interior budget for next year that ban the agency from spending any money to pursue new offshore oil and gas drilling in federal waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Without funding, the Trump administration cannot hold public hearings, perform the legal work, complete required studies and oversee lease sales to oil companies.
“Congress is saying you can’t have the money to drill here,” said veteran coastal activist Richard Charter of Bodega Bay, a senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation. “I think Trump’s offshore drilling plan is dead in the water for now.”
The move mirrors a tactic that Democrats, led by former congressman Leon Panetta of Monterey, successfully used every year starting in 1982 to block former President Reagan and his Interior Secretary, James Watt, from leasing federal waters off the Big Sur, San Mateo and Sonoma coasts to oil companies for new drilling.
It affects the Interior Department budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, and would need to be renewed a year from now.
The White House and Department of Interior did not respond Monday to a request for comment.
Environmental groups cheered.
“This decisive action by the House of Representatives to block funding to advance offshore drilling activities supports healthy communities, oceans, national parks, climate and marine life,” the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other conservation groups said in a joint statement. “We cannot allow the oil and gas industry to boost its profits while our environment and coastal economies suffer the consequences of devastating oil spills.”
The votes were somewhat bipartisan. Overall, 25 Republicans, mostly from coastal districts on the East Coast, voted with Democrats.
The House amendments were attached to two spending bills. One would fund the U.S. Department of Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (H.R. 3052), and the other would fund the departments of Commerce, Justice and other related agencies (H.R. 3055).
Three Democrats, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, Rep. Salud Carbajal of Santa Barbara, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida, added language to the Interior and EPA budget bills to bar the use of federal funds for offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts respectively.
Two other amendments that the House also passed block the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, from using funds to allow seismic air gun blasting, a tool used by oil companies to find oil and gas.
Another amendment by Rep. Jared Huffman of Marin County blocks NOAA from weakening states’ review of offshore drilling in federal waters.
The House is expected to hold a final vote on the spending bills this week. They go then to the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.
The Senate is not considered likely to block the House actions, however, because several Republicans representing coastal states, such as Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, where business leaders and GOP governors have come out against new drilling, quietly oppose it.
The zero-funding strategy is the latest move in Washington’s tug-of-war over offshore drilling.
In January, 2018, the Trump administration proposed the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. history, releasing a plan to allow new drilling off the coasts of Northern, Central and Southern California, along with most of the East Coast.
U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called it “a new path for energy dominance in America.”
Lease sales to oil companies were to begin in 2020 off Southern California, and 2021 off Northern and Central California, the administration said. The announcement overturned a five-year plan that the Obama administration had put in place banning new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Offshore drilling is banned in state waters out to three miles in California, under a law signed by former Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, in the 1990s. The Trump plan would have allowed it in federal waters, from three to 200 miles offshore.
This April, however, after Republicans in Florida told Trump officials that his drilling plans could cost him the critical state in the 2020 election, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told the Wall Street Journal that the plan was being “sidelined indefinitely” while his agency worked through legal challenges to it.
Environmentalists called Thursday’s vote insurance.
“Given all of Bernhardt’s connections to industry,” Charter said, “I don’t think Congress wants to trust him with the entire coast.”
