By Nate Raymond (NSE 🙂
(Reuters) – President Donald Trump introduced a ban on Monday in an executive order that was imposed by the former Democratic President Joe Biden on new offshore oil and gas development along most coastlines of the country. Trump will certainly make legal challenges about his authority to do this.
What have Biden and Trump done?
On January 6, Biden used his authority under the 70-year-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to withdraw all federal waters of the East and West coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska drill from oil and gas.
Biden said that the move is in accordance with its efforts to combat climate change and to say that “drilling these coasts can cause irreversible damage to places that we are dear and not necessary to meet the energy needs of our nation.”
Trump had long promised to expand oil and gas development. He withdrew the offshore drill ban on Monday, one of the dozens of actions that Biden took that Trump moved to the office on his first day.
Trump has also withdrawn an earlier action that Biden in March 2023 undertook that oil and gas drilling in 2.8 million hectares in the Northern Ice Sea prevented.
Can Trump do that?
Legal experts say that the question of whether a president can withdraw the decision of a pastor to call the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (Ocsla) and draw areas from mineral leasing and drilling, remains uneasy.
While the law explicitly grants the authority to set aside countries, the 1953 measure is silent about whether they are able to withdraw previous decisions. The question is only in court once, during Trump’s first government.
What was that case?
Environmental groups sued after Trump issued an executive order in April 2017 that was designed to withdraw a similar decision of democratic former President Barack Obama. Obama called on Ocesla and put the Chukchi Sea of the North Pole area, part of the Beaufort Sea of the North Pole Benefit, together with a large part of the Atlantic Ocean for the American East Coast.
In 2019, the American district judge Sharon Gleason in Anchorage ruled that the order of Trump was illegal. “Had the congress had meant to grant the president of the president, could have done this explicitly, as before in various (but not all) of the previously established highland laws”, “she wrote.
Trump’s government in defending his order had cited language in the Ocsla which stated that a president “can withdraw” unknown countries from time to time, and said that this has supported a power to revise previous recording decisions.
But Gleason, an Obama -appointed, said in her statement that the Oscla only left the congress with the authority to cancel the withdrawal of the country.
Before the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, established in San Francisco, was able to decide on the government of the Trump on its decision, Biden took office and withdrew the order of Trump on his first day, with the matter being fueled.
Will the New Order of Trump also end up in court?
Trump’s executive order to reverse Biden’s action will probably invite a new legal challenge of environmental activists and possibly arrange the matter of withdrawal of the president of a president.
But the order of Biden itself is already challenged before the court in two separate lawsuits, including one by the five Republican attorney -general and two industrial trading groups American Petroleum Institute and the Gulf Energy Alliance and another by the Republican attorney -general Ken Paxton, In addition to oil and producer W&T Offshore (NYSE :).
