(task) In Shift, Obama Won’t Open Southeast Atlantic Coast to Drilling - The New York Times

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> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/us/politics/obama-administration-cancels-plan-to-allow-oil-drilling-off-southeast-us-coast.html?_r=0 <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/us/politics/obama-administration-cancels-plan-to-allow-oil-drilling-off-southeast-us-coast.html?_r=0>
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> In Shift, Obama Won’t Open Southeast Atlantic Coast to Drilling
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> An anti-drilling protester in Kure Beach, N.C., in January. The Interior Department scuttled the drilling proposal on Tuesday. Travis Dove for The New York Times
> When the Obama administration unveiled a proposal in January 2015 to open the southeastern Atlantic coast to oil <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/oil-petroleum-and-gasoline/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> and gas drilling for the first time, environmental advocates were shocked and enraged — and the oil industry <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/oil-petroleum-and-gasoline/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> was delighted.
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> The emotions were the same, just on opposite sides of the energy-environmental divide, when the Interior Department announced Tuesday that the administration was yanking Atlantic drilling off the table. And almost everyone was shocked.
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> In the balance between business demands and environmental conservation, President Obama <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per> has shown clearly where he wants his legacy to lean. He has killed the Keystone XL <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/k/keystone_pipeline/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> pipeline, announced a moratorium on coal extraction from federal lands, and now, after first signaling that he would approve East Coast oil drilling, he has opted to keep the oil under the sea.
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> Obama administration officials said Tuesday that the decision was driven by many factors, but two stood out: an organized outpouring of opposition from the mayors and municipal councils in more than 100 of the coastal communities in the four states that would be affected by the drilling, and concern from the Pentagon that oil and gas exploration could threaten activities around Virginia’s Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval base.
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> “We heard from many corners that now is not the time to offer oil and gas leasing off the Atlantic coast,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said. “When you factor in conflicts with national defense, economic activities such as fishing and tourism, and opposition from many local communities, it simply doesn’t make sense to move forward with any lease sales in the coming five years.”
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> Republicans reacted angrily to the move. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin said: “President Obama <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per> is so intent on solidifying his radical climate legacy that he has backed out of his commitment to a large, bipartisan coalition of state leaders. These states simply want to explore their own energy potential, but the president’s reversal has disenfranchised them of this chance. This is a lost opportunity for new jobs and economic growth in these coastal states.”
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> Continue reading the main story
> But while Obama administration officials knew they would face an angry response to the move, they also benefited politically from another factor: The price of oil has plunged to near record lows, easing the public demand for fresh drilling.
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> When developing the initial Atlantic drilling plan last year, Obama administration officials said they were chiefly listening to four people: Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, and Pat McCrory, Nikki R. Haley and Nathan Deal, the Republican governors of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The governors told Mr. Obama they wanted the drilling, and they were backed by majorities in their state legislatures and senators.
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> That initial January 2015 proposal, reflecting the wishes of the coastal state governors, came as part of the Interior Department’s mandated release of regular five-year plans governing the federally owned waters of the nation’s outer continental shelf.
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> As they sought to revise and fine-tune the draft plan, the administration opened it for public comments. That tapped different voices in those states.
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> Residents of coastal communities feared that drilling in the Atlantic would bring a repeat of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 men and sent millions of barrels of oil spewing onto beaches.
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> Mayors of a handful of small coastal communities assembled to pass resolutions asking Mr. Obama to take the Atlantic out of the drilling plan, sending those resolutions to the Interior Department. Environmental advocates began to organize aggressively. One group, Oceana, contacted mayors up and down the coast, urging them to pass similar resolutions.
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> “We thought, maybe we could replicate this and scale it,” said Jacqueline Savitz, a vice president of Oceana. “And then we started seeing numbers like 30 resolutions and 50 resolutions.”
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> Eventually, more than 106 coastal cities and towns in the coastal states enacted similar resolutions. Oceana teamed with regional groups, including the Southern Environmental Law Center. The groups covered lawns and beaches with “No to drilling” signs, but focused their attention on pushing through municipal actions that would resonate in Washington. They also worked behind the scenes to coordinate several anti-drilling opinion pieces in local newspapers from Richmond to Charleston.
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> In November 2015 and January 2016, Oceana arranged for several local coastal government and business leaders to travel to Washington to meet with White House officials, including Mr. Obama’s top environmental policy adviser, Brian Deese, as well as with Abigail Hopper, the director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. At the January meeting, Ms. Savitz presented the officials with a thick binder of the municipal resolutions, covered with a map highlighting all the towns that had passed those resolutions, dropping it on the desk with a thud.
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> Frank Knapp, the president of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, was at those meetings. “It was clear that while they had heard from the governors, they hadn’t heard from the smaller local groups,” Mr. Knapp said. “I talked to them about the threat to our tourist economy.” In particular, Mr. Knapp stressed to the officials that even the process of seismic testing, which uses blasts of sound underwater to determine whether there was oil and gas, could distress coastal residents.
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> Outside of those meetings, Ms. Hopper was traveling the region, asking for resident input in dozens of meetings.
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> The Pentagon submitted a report to the Interior Department laying out concerns with offshore drilling <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/o/offshore_drilling_and_exploration/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> in the Atlantic. The report noted that off the coast of Norfolk naval base, the military conducts highly sensitive operations, including the use of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and live ordnance testing. The report did not call on the administration to ban the drilling, but it noted the sensitivity of conducting drilling in the vicinity of military activities. It was the combination of those factors, more than any others, administration officials say, that led to Tuesday’s decision.
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> The Republican governors were not assuaged. “President Obama’s total reversal can only be described as a special political favor to far-left countries hostile to the United States,” Mr. McCrory said in a statement.
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> In South Carolina, Ms. Haley, speaking at a news conference, said the administration had turned “around to pull the rug out from under us.”
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> In Virginia, Mr. McAuliffe suggested that there would be a way to move forward with the drilling after reassuring the Pentagon. “Today’s announcement is an opportunity to work with the Department of Defense to address the concerns they have raised, and to ensure that any offshore energy exploration is coupled with a revenue-sharing agreement that benefits our Commonwealth,” he said in a statement.