MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
President Biden is protecting vast stretches of the ocean from oil drilling. The protection is designed to be permanent, a way of cementing his environmental legacy. It is also almost certain to be challenged by the incoming Trump administration. NPR's Camila Domonoske covers energy. Hi, Camila.
CAMILA DOMONOSKE, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.
KELLY: What exactly did Biden announce today?
DOMONOSKE: Well, he's using this decades-old law that allows presidents to say, this patch of ocean, we're going to protect it - no drilling there. But he's using it to protect far more ocean than any president ever has. We are talking the entire East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and some of the Bering Sea up by Alaska - all of this with no end date, and it adds up to some 625 million acres.
KELLY: Six hundred and twenty-five million acres, which is - I mean, can you give us some comparison?
DOMONOSKE: Yeah...
KELLY: How do I visualize how big that is?
DOMONOSKE: Think about California, and then multiply it by six. So Joseph Gordon is with the nonprofit Oceana, which supports ocean conservation.
JOSEPH GORDON: This is a really, really vast area off our coasts, and it encompasses so many different species, habitats and places that we want to leave future generations. And this is just an amazing day to see that.
DOMONOSKE: So a lot of acreage here. It's also a big gesture. Kevin Book is with the research firm ClearView Energy. He says this is Biden's last opportunity to make good on some of his campaign promises about climate change and oil.
KEVIN BOOK: This is his final act. It's symbolically quite large; practically, maybe less so.
KELLY: Camila, stay on that point for a second. When he says symbolically quite large, practically less so, what does that mean?
DOMONOSKE: Well, right now, oil companies are not particularly interested in drilling in these parts of ocean that are being set aside. And in some cases, they are already blocked from drilling there, temporarily. In fact, President-elect Trump, in his first presidency, protected some ocean off the southeast - Florida, Georgia area - not permanently, but it's currently blocked, right?
KELLY: OK.
DOMONOSKE: So in the here and now, no immediate impact, really. But the offshore oil industry says, in the long run, this could be quite significant. I spoke with Erik Milito, who runs a trade group.
ERIK MILITO: This industry that I represent, the offshore oil and gas industry, has long had interest in looking in new areas to at least see what deposits might be there, and we're going to run out of running room at some point in the Gulf of Mexico.
DOMONOSKE: The Gulf being where a ton of offshore production happens now, so they'll need to find new areas, he says, and this would limit where they can go and discourage investment.
KELLY: Although, Camila, do they need to find new areas, more places to drill? I thought the whole thing was the world is moving away from oil.
DOMONOSKE: Yeah, this is a dispute that is at the heart of a ton of debates happening in energy right now. There are profoundly different views, right? Milito, this advocate for the offshore industry, his outlook here is based on a world where demand for oil is going to rise. President Biden, making this announcement, talked about a transition to clean energy to fight climate change and said the U.S. will not need this oil. They are looking at fundamentally different futures. And when I say future, offshore oil in particular, this is an industry that thinks on very long timelines. So when we're talking about what the real significance of this might be, it is not something that would play out this year, next year, but we're talking decades into the future.
KELLY: So interesting. But then if Biden says he wants this protection to be permanent, is it? Or will President-elect Trump or some future president-elect just be able to reverse it?
DOMONOSKE: Yeah, it's widely expected Trump would try. We know it won't be easy because President Obama protected a bunch of ocean, and Trump was not able to reverse that. Courts found that the law at play here doesn't have an undo button. Congress certainly might put this acreage back on the table for drilling, and selling oil leases makes money for the government, so they might want to. I will note, Joseph Gordon from Oceana pointed out Trump himself protected that ocean off the southeast, so he's hoping to find common ground - or maybe I should say common ocean.
KELLY: (Laughter) Common ocean. NPR's Camila Domonoske, thank you.
DOMONOSKE: Thanks, Mary Louise.
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