Jeff Whitten, Correspondent
President Joe Biden on Monday announced a measure to permanently ban offshore drilling and gas exploration off much of the U.S. coast, and all of Georgia’s 100 miles of coastline.
While the announcement was welcomed by area environmental groups such as Brunswick-based One Hundred Miles, which in an email called Biden’s action “a significant victory for Georgia communities,” it drew criticism from U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-1, who serves as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Carter told Fox News on Tuesday in a brief interview that Biden declared war on fossil fuels when he took office four years ago. Carter said Monday’s ban on offshore drilling on the U.S. coast was a “continuation” of those policies.
“They just don’t get it,” Carter said. “He doesn’t get it. This is the radical environmentalists he’s bending a knee too. It’s costing American jobs, costing the American economy and it’s causing the American cost of living to increase.”
Local governments, meanwhile, earlier passed resolutions opposing drilling and seismic exploration for oil off the Georgia coast.
“Since 2014, nearly all our local coastal towns and many counties {have} asked for this protection,” One Hundred Miles’ vice president for conservation, Alice Keyes, said in an email, adding “over 20 communities representing more than a million Georgians passed resolutions opposing offshore drilling.”
Among them was Richmond Hill’s City Council, which passed its resolution in March 2018. A year later, the City of Pembroke approved a similar resolution, and in April 2019 members of Georgia’s House passed HR 48, which opposes seismic testing and oil and gas drilling activities off the state’s coast. Sponsors of the bill included Democrats and Republicans, and it passed 125-36.
As a result, in 2019 Carter sent a letter to then acting Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt in which Carter cited HB 48 to request that waters off Georgia’s coast be excluded from offshore drilling. Carter, while noting he supports energy independence, wrote he was “elected to represent the entire coast of our state and be their voice in Washington.
“I believe that the will of our state and local communities must be respected in a decision of this magnitude,” Carter’s 2019 letter said, adding “the federal government should respect the people of Georgia to make this critical decision for themselves.”
In Biden’s announcement, the President said his decision to impose the ban “reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs. It is not worth the risks. As the climate crisis continues to threaten communities across the country and we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren.”
Biden used his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, according to the White House, and the measure is aimed at prohibiting future oil exploration or drilling off much of the U.S. coast, including some 334 million acres of the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf, which stretches from Florida north to Canada and includes the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
In all, the measure protects more than 660 million acres along all of the United States’ coastlines.
Georgia’s coastal heritage
Georgia’s coast, protected by barrier islands, is home to approximately 360,000 acres of saltwater marsh, according to the Department of Natural Resources, but University of Georgia studies in 2016 showed the state’s marsh had declined by some 36 percent since 1984. The loss has been blamed on a number of factors, including development.
Studies say Georgia has a third of all the saltwater marsh on the Eastern seaboard, which has lost an estimated 70 percent of its marsh. The Nature Conservancy said that loss is primarily due to development.
Georgia’s waters also serve as calving grounds for the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
Fewer than 350 of the whales remain, according to DNR, and “the species has been declining rapidly since 2010 because of a combination of high human-caused mortality and low calving rates. An estimated two dozen whales have died each year since 2010, most from entanglement in heavy synthetic fishing rope and collisions with boats and ships.”
It’s unclear what happens next. President-Elect Donald Trump reportedly promised Tuesday he will “unban” the action on his first day in office, and the ban came under fire from oil industry groups. An online publication, Energy in Depth, published by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, called Biden’s executive action “catastrophic.”
In a press release, IPAA Offshore Committee Chairman Ron Neal said it “represents a major attack on the oil and natural gas industry. This should be seen as the ‘elephant’s nose under the tent.’ The ban severely limits potential for exploration and development in new areas therefore choking the long-term survivability of the industry.”
Whitten is a freelance correspondent with the Bryan County News.