President Joe Biden is making a sweeping transfer to ban all future offshore oil and pure fuel drilling on America’s East and West coasts, the Japanese Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.
“My choice displays what coastal communities, companies, and beachgoers have identified for a very long time: that drilling off these coasts might trigger irreversible harm to locations we maintain expensive and is pointless to fulfill our nation’s power wants. It isn’t definitely worth the dangers,” Biden stated in an announcement saying the choice.
President Joe Biden speaks on the dying of former U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jimmy Carter, who died on the age of 100, on the Firm Home Resort, in Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, Dec. 29, 2024.
Ken Cedeno/Reuters
In accordance with the White Home truth sheet, this transfer blocks drilling in additional than 625 million acres of U.S. oceans.
The very fact sheet provides that Biden took these actions underneath “Part 12(a) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act” and provides that his actions “don’t have any expiration date, and prohibit all future oil and pure fuel leasing” within the designated areas.
“We don’t want to decide on between defending the atmosphere and rising our economic system, or between holding our ocean wholesome, our coastlines resilient, and the meals they produce safe and holding power costs low. These are false decisions,” Biden added.

Gasoline is flared off from a flame increase aboard DCOR LLC’s Edith offshore oil and fuel platform within the Beta Subject off the coast of Lengthy Seashore, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Could 18, 2010. Senators from California, Oregon and Washington launched laws final week to ban offshore oil drilling off the West Coast amid mounting concern in regards to the BP Deepwater Horizon rig spill spreading within the Gulf of Mexico. Photographer: Tim Rue/Bloomberg by way of Getty Pictures
Bloomberg by way of Getty Pictures
The very fact sheet says that after this sweeping transfer, “Biden may have conserved extra lands and waters than another U.S. president in historical past.”
The motion comes as President-elect Trump frequently made his “drill, child, drill” promise on the marketing campaign path, vowing to unlock America’s drilling capabilities in an effort to decrease power prices for People.