Though lawmakers, Cabinet members and White House staff have gone in and out of favor with President Trump in his short time in office, he’s consistently been best buddies with Big Oil – and now that he’s pushing hard for exploration and drilling in the Atlantic Ocean, Maine’s congressional delegation should be just as intent on stopping this ruinous plan in its tracks.
Seismic tests and oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic Ocean were barred under the Obama administration, but Trump the candidate promised that things would be different if he were elected. And at the end of his first hundred days in office, he gave his fossil fuel industry allies a big gift, announcing the signing of an executive order opening millions of acres of federal waters in the Atlantic to oil and gas leasing.
Like-minded lawmakers on Capitol Hill are pursuing the same destructive agenda. Last week, House Republicans passed a budget that included a provision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. This week saw a committee hearing on a draft proposal, hailed by House Republicans, that would essentially hand over all of our oceans to oil companies.
The Accessing Strategic Resources Offshore Act is a recipe for disaster. It would allow the interior secretary to offer oil lease sales anywhere in federal waters at any time – dispensing with a five-year approval process, put in place in 1978, that requires leasing plans to receive vetting every step of the way from industry, the public and elected officials in adjacent states.
The ASTRO Act would stop residents and elected officials from expressing serious and valid concerns about the impact of oil exploration and drilling. Finding oil under the ocean floor requires seismic testing, in which towering arrays of airguns towed by ships emit blasts loud enough, according to scientists, to decrease the commercial fishing catch by an average of 50 percent over thousands of square miles.
And any marine life that managed to weather the testing would be at risk from an oil spill or an oil well blowout. Speaking of which: Such a disaster in the Atlantic would spew oil into the Gulf Stream and send it up the Eastern Seaboard, affecting tourism and fishing industries that generate an estimated $95 billion a year and support nearly 1.4 million jobs in states from Maine to Florida.
“Oh, you will like me so much,” Donald Trump told fossil fuel executives on the campaign trail. No doubt, they do. Now Maine’s members of Congress should help make sure that the people whose livelihoods would be threatened by Atlantic drilling get equal say in Washington.
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