WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Biden announced Monday that he is banning offshore oil and gas drilling in large swaths of federal waters, including 44 million acres off Alaska, in the Northern Bering Sea.
“In Alaska, dozens of Tribes have fought to protect the Northern Bering Sea, a vital ocean ecosystem that supports their traditional ways of life. Vice President Harris and I have listened,” Biden said in his announcement.
Alaska Native organizations representing more than 70 tribes in western Alaska and the Bering Straits area issued a joint statement celebrating the announcement.
“Tribes in the region have been requesting this action since the early 1980s," said marine advocate Anna Rose MacArthur at Kawerak, a Nome-based tribal nonprofit. "It has been four decades of seeking this. And so this is a huge accomplishment that's shared across generations, really."
Tribal leaders say protecting the area from drilling will safeguard the fish, birds and marine mammals they depend on for food and to sustain their culture.
The Alaska region subject to the ban has no oil and gas development underway and the industry is not clamoring to get into it. The ban adds to an offshore withdrawal then-President Obama made when he created the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area in 2016.
Both Obama and Biden used a portion of a 1953 law to withdraw the areas.
Incoming President Donald Trump is pledging to reverse it.
“It’s ridiculous. I’ll unban it immediately. I have the right to unban it immediately," Trump told talk show host Hugh Hewitt.
But it's not clear Trump can reverse the ban without an act of Congress. The law doesn’t have a provision for reversing a presidential withdrawal. In 2019, a U.S. District Court judge in Anchorage struck down Trump’s attempt to reverse Obama’s Bering Sea withdrawal.
On Sunday, as news of the offshore ban leaked, Alaska’s new congressman denounced Biden’s action, and the president personally. In a social media post, U.S. Rep. Nick Begich noted the importance of Cook Inlet gas to Alaskans. Biden’s closure doesn’t extend to Cook Inlet. A Begich spokeswoman said he knows that. A statement from his office on Monday said he believes the federal government’s adversarial stance toward oil and gas drilling diminishes the industry’s interest in offshore leases and he doesn’t think a president should lock up resources by fiat.
Sen. Dan Sullivan also blasted Biden.
“I think President Biden’s legacy is going to be the worst president in American history, in terms of American energy," Sullivan said in a Fox News appearance.
(Biden, for all his emphasis on clean energy and protecting federal land, presided over a record boom in oil production.)
Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s reaction was more nuanced. In 2018, she and Sullivan asked then-president Trump’s Interior Department to remove the entire Bering Sea region from upcoming lease sales, and the Gulf of Alaska.
Monday, she acknowledged regional opposition to offshore drilling in the Bering Sea but said Biden’s ban is too sweeping and shouldn’t have come so close to the end of his term.
The ban leaves much of the Gulf of Mexico available for leases. That area is the source of 97% of the nation’s offshore production.
