As we sit here watching the cabinet choices for the incoming Trump administration pile up, their priorities for our public lands and waters could not be clearer. These are “energy dominance” crusaders who are not at all interested in the habitat that America’s public lands and waters provide for wildlife, but rather in the profits they provide to fossil fuel industry CEOs. They are looking to drill, and hoping that the American public won’t think about the spills that will inevitably follow.
They’re also making it sound like all this drilling is already a done deal. But that’s where they're wrong. Federal laws still protect our wildlife and their habitat – and importantly, also protect your ability to speak up for what you care about.
How Does Offshore Drilling Affect Wildlife?
For this blog, we’re going to focus on offshore drilling, and for anyone who remembers the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, where the impacts of this dirty and dangerous industry were very clearly on display for all the world to see. On April 20, 2010, BP’s Macondo well blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and initiating the largest oil spill in the United States’ history, spilling 134 million gallons of oil over the course of nearly three months.1 The uninterrupted flow of oil was livestreamed from the ocean floor,2 the daily news was filled with images of birds covered in oil and unable to fly3 and whales and dolphins swimming through oil,4 and stories documented heavily oiled threatened and endangered sea turtles likely being burned alive as part of efforts to clean up the oil before it reached the shore.5
While scientists are still assessing the long-term impacts from the spill, the immediate aftermath was devastating. Tens of thousands of sea turtles were killed, including an estimated 35,000 hatchlings lost to the spill and associated clean-up activities on sea turtle nesting beaches.6 The highly endangered Rice’s whale is thought to have lost 22% of its population to impacts from the spill.7 Bottlenose dolphins in Barataria Bay, where heavy oiling occurred, suffered high direct mortality, impacted reproduction, and lung disease, resulting in a 50% population decline.8 More than one million birds are thought to have died during the acute phase of the spill.9
Defenders was there for all of it in 2010 and the years that followed – in the courts, the field, and on Capitol Hill, trying to control the damage, understand the toll, and ensure that it never happens again.10
But apparently this is a battle we must continue to fight, in large part because industry continues to toe the line that this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence that will never happen again. But some of us also remember the Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1989.11 That spill released 11 million gallons of oil, killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, thousands of sea otters, hundreds of harbor seals and bald eagles, killer whales, and billions of salmon and herring eggs. Again, scientists are still assessing the long-term effects to the spill, and 25 years after the spill, important fisheries still have not returned.12
And even when there isn’t a spill, the everyday operations of the offshore drilling industry have significant impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems. Seismic blasting, which allows the oil industry to search for oil deposits deep beneath the ocean floor, can impact marine mammal communication and cause them to leave an area, among other impacts.13 Ships used for transporting crews and equipment cause pollution, ocean noise, and vessel strikes.14 Pipelines corrode and leak, and their installation destroys wetlands.15
What Laws Govern Offshore Drilling?
All of these impacts show exactly why it’s so important to have strong laws that govern offshore drilling. Indeed, a 1969 well blowout off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, which caused the injury and death of thousands of seabirds and many marine mammals, is widely regarded as one of the key factors in passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, also known as NEPA.16 NEPA requires federal agencies take a “hard look” at the possible impacts of their actions before they take them, in an effort to educate the public and decisionmakers, and ultimately, to make better decisions.17 Thanks to that law, any plans to drill off the U.S. coast are required to study the risk of oil spills to threatened and endangered species and the marine environment, the impacts of air and water pollution that occur even when there isn’t a major spill, and the impacts of the chemicals and other techniques used to clean up spills when there is one.
The law that establishes the way we drill for oil and gas off our coasts is the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, or OCSLA.18 OCSLA sets forth a detailed step-wise process to manage the leasing and development of energy resources on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which generally extends from 3-200 nautical miles off our coasts. The OCLSA process acts like a funnel, starting broadly with the development of a five-year nationwide leasing program, and then narrowing down to individual lease sales, exploratory drilling permits, and finally to development and production, with applicable NEPA and ESA reviews required at each stage.19 In deciding what areas to include in a five-year program, OCSLA requires the federal government to consider multiple factors, including national energy needs and infrastructure, resource availability, environmental sensitivity, competing uses of the seafloor, and state and local policies, among others.20 If an area is dropped from consideration at any point in the program development process, it is effectively “off the table” until the next program is developed.
How Can You Protect Your Coast?
The biggest thing we can do to protect our coast is speak up for what we want it to look like. Importantly, both NEPA and OCSLA include lots of opportunities for public comment. The industry and the Trump administration are calling for “streamlining” this process – as well as reviews for other energy projects – to rush them through. But cutting that process would also cut the ability for you and your elected representatives to have your say. Notably, the Deepwater Horizon disaster itself happened under a NEPA “categorical exclusion” – a streamlining process that allowed the agency and the company to avoid environmental review and public participation.21
In 2018, the first Trump administration proposed the largest offshore leasing program in history, including over 90% of federal waters. But that draft program never proceeded beyond comment on that document – primarily because YOU pushed back. Indeed, President Trump himself went from calling for annual lease sales in the Central and South Atlantic in his Executive Order Implementing an America-First Energy Policy in 2017,22 to withdrawing these areas from consideration for drilling from 2022-2032 in 2022.23
So, what happens now? When the new Trump administration takes office in January, all indications are that they will immediately begin work on a new five-year program. Project 2025 calls for the new administration to “[d]evelop and immediately finalize a new five-year plan, while working with Congress to reform the OCSLA by eliminating five-year plans in favor of rolling or quarterly lease sales.”24 In other words, they want to drill your coast and limit your ability to stop that from happening.
Defenders is gearing up and will be ready on Day 1, in the courts, Congress, and working through those legal processes to speak up for wildlife. We’ll also be here to make sure YOU know how to join our efforts and can weigh in to protect your coast and the wildlife you love.
1See generally, Deepwater: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling, Report to the President from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, available at
2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/may/20/deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-live-web-footage
7https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-02/110.%20NOAA%2C%20Rice%27s%20Whale.pdf
10 See e.g., https://defenders.org/magazine/summer-2010/defenders-responds-offshore-oil-disaster; https://defenders.org/magazine/summer-2011/what-oil-spill; https://defenders.org/newsroom/bp-be-sued-over-harm-endangered-species; https://defenders.org/newsroom/new-lease-sale-ignores-bp-deepwater-horizon-disaster; https://defenders.org/blog/2010/05/news-roundup-expert-richard-charter-says;; https://defenders.org/sites/default/files/publications/wildlife_and_offshore_drilling_refuges.pdf; https://defenders.org/blog/2010/08/reflections-water. See also https://defenders.org/magazine/fall-2019/license-spill; https://defenders.org/blog/2020/04/gulf-10-years-after-deepwater-disaster.
14 https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.1987
15 https://darrp.noaa.gov/oil-spills/refugio-beach-oil-spill
16 National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321, et seq.
17 https://ceq.doe.gov/docs/ceq-publications/nepa25fn.pdf
18 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, 43 U.S.C. §§ 1331, et seq.
19 See 2024-2029 Final OCS Leasing Program, available at
20 Id. at 2-2, Figure 2-1.
21 See Oil Spill Commission report, supra note 1, at 80-83.
23 See
24 Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, available at
Author
Sierra Weaver
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