Offshore Drilling Foes Invoke 1953 Law to Prod Obama on U.S. Ban
Environmental activists who dangled from bridges and paddled kayaks around an Arctic rig have a new strategy for stopping oil development off U.S. coasts: persuading President Barack Obama to use a 1953 law to bar offshore drilling permanently.
An obscure provision that’s been used to preserve coral reefs and walrus feeding grounds empowers presidents to exclude waters from future oil and gas development. Environmentalists want Obama to invoke that statute before leaving office to indefinitely block drilling in the U.S. Atlantic and Arctic.
They saw the opportunity after Royal Dutch Shell Plc abandoned Arctic drilling and Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline last year.
"We think this is a moment in time," said Niel Lawrence, Alaska director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The last big thing this administration can do is take off the table the places where the government is not in the oil business, where the communities are not reliant on it, where the infrastructure isn’t in place and where the oil couldn’t come for 25 or 30 years."
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-24/offshore-drilling-foes-invoke-1953-law-to-prod-obama-on-u-s-ban
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