Outgoing President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to take advantage of provisions in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to permanently ban his successor from achieving his energy policy goal of dramatically ramping up domestic energy production.
Sources told Bloomberg Biden is getting ready to announce an executive order prohibiting portions of America’s outer continental shelf deemed critical to coastal environmental resilience from being sold off to energy companies for exploration.
The affected waters could include areas of the Pacific coast, and waters near Florida in the Gulf of Mexico.
26 December 2024, 14:48 GMT
Biden’s move could ultimately hamper the Trump administration’s so-called 3-3-3 economic strategy, which includes a 3 million barrel-per-day (bpd) jump in domestic oil output, 3% annual GDP growth, and a push to cut the deficit to 3% of GDP.
A 3 million bpd bump in oil production would increase output to as much as 16.5 million bpd, with current US output already at historic highs as imports of foreign oil drop and as Washington aggressively pushes into foreign markets, including Europe, knocking out competitors like Russia using sanctions and other tools of economic warfare using the Ukrainian crisis as a pretext.
23 November 2024, 15:25 GMT
Energy is just one of the policy areas where Biden is looking to trip up Trump before leaving office.
Over the past month, he's commuted the sentences of a vast majority of death row inmates, issued dozens of presidential pardons, including for his troubled son Hunter, forgiven the school loan debts of 55,000 public service workers, and sought to ‘Trump-proof’ the conflict with Russia in Ukraine by ramping up arms deliveries and greenlighting Ukrainian missile attacks deep inside Russia.