Over the past couple of months, the avalanche of bad policy decisions and deluge of revelations about Donald Trump, his family and minions may have conspired to blur your memory a bit. So you may only vaguely remember that Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke rang in the new year by announcing the regime’s five-year plan to open up 98 percent of America’s continental shelf to oil and gas drilling.
He immediately collided over the plan not just with Democrats and environmental advocates, but with a hunk of Republicans as well. Even the climate science deniers among them aren’t sanguine about what that drilling could mean should there be an accident like, say, the Deep Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico eight years ago.
That Republican opposition could wreck Zinke’s entire plan. That’s the kind of hopeful environmental news we get far too little of these days.
The first collision after the drilling plan’s announcement was with Floridians. Gov. Rick Scott, Sen. Bill Nelson, and 20 of the state’s 27-member congressional delegation let Zinke know that drilling off the coast of The Sunshine State is a terrible idea. After meeting with Scott, who is seeking a Senate seat this year, Zinke agreed to make an adjustment. Calling Florida “unique,” with an economy driven by tourism, he retreated, saying no new oil or gas platforms would be approved off the state’s extensive coasts.
Naturally, that didn’t sit well with officials in other states. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra pointed out that The Golden State is also unique and relies on tourism. Leaders in other states soon piped up. And now, it’s Republican opposition that has put Zinke in a bind. Emma Dumain at McClatchy reports:
In a meeting with affected coastal GOP representatives last week, Zinke reaffirmed an exemption from the drilling for Florida, hinted to New Jersey officials their state was likely to be spared and left a Virginia congressman optimistic the policy would be overturned for his state, too. And Zinke said he’d travel to South Carolina to get a better sense of their concerns as well.
If Zinke carves out exceptions for all these states, the idea of cross-Atlantic oil drilling could be dead. [...]
Seeking to clean up a bureaucratic mess, Zinke has since been visiting Capitol Hill and speaking with governors who want carve-outs. Following a Feb. 27 meeting Zinke convened on Capitol Hill with East Coast Republican representatives, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said her boss was “happy to meet with coastal representatives to discuss the offshore plan.”
Representatives from Virginia, South Carolina, and New Jersey came away from the meeting with the sense that they’ll for sure get exemptions. People at a meeting between the secretary and North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, said Zinke noted that communities all along the Atlantic Coast don’t now have the infrastructure to accommodate offshore drilling. While that infrastructure could be built, it would take longer than five years to get it into place. This hints at a major pullback from the original plan.
The trouble with that if you are Zinke, and the joy with it if you are an environmental advocate, is that every state exemption will make it ever-tougher to implement any part of the plan.
There is, however, a caveat from Rep. Rob Bishop, the Utah Republican who has long sought to put federal lands into state or private hands for, among other things, intensive mineral and fossil fuel extraction:
“I don’t think Zinke made a final commitment to anybody,” Bishop said. “Until you see something in black and white, almost everyone hears what they want to hear. Until you see it written down, nothing is finalized.”
True enough. But today marks the end of the 60-day public comment period on the drilling plan, and Zinke is now going to have to figure out how to placate the objectors. If they were just Democrats and environmentalists, he could un-shoe that horse he loves to show off and ride roughshod over the opposition. But doing that to the plan’s Republican foes would add another layer to the growing GOP civil war, something the party can ill afford.