Trump to Push Offshore Oil Expansion to After 2020 Election, Sources Say

[Beringia]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/trump-said-to-push-offshore-oil-expansion-to-after-2020-election?fbclid=IwAR11NxOxrUSqf43gmeLzOiORb9wKSh2SFyQ-SW-omRwZfvGd2ZOgYxjnXOQ


The Trump administration is delaying its bid to expand oil drilling to new U.S. waters until after the 2020 election in response to opposition from coastal Republicans and a legal defeat, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Administration officials are worried that the president and Republican leaders in the southeast U.S. would lose votes if they pushed forward with the plan to sell new drilling rights in the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific oceans, said the people, who asked not to be identified revealing confidential discussions. Procedural missteps and a court ruling jeopardizing new oil drilling opportunities in Arctic waters also complicated the effort.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt last month told senators that the administration was back “at the very beginning” of the long process of writing a new five-year plan for selling offshore oil and gas leases.

Bernhardt’s remark was a defeat for oil companies eager for new offshore acreage and represents the latest snag in a tortured two-year bid by the Trump administration to expand coastal waters available for drilling.

President Donald Trump in 2017 ordered the Interior Department to consider scheduling new sales of drilling rights along U.S. coastlines, with an eye on annual auctions of territory in the western and central Gulf of Mexico, the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska, and the mid- and south-Atlantic.

The agency responded in January 2018 with a draft plan opening the door to selling drilling rights in more than 90 percent of U.S. coastal waters.

In the court ruling March 29, an Alaska-based judge found Trump exceeded his legal authority in trying to resume oil and gas leasing in more than 125 million acres (50.6 million hectares) of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans that former President Barack Obama had sought to protect. Legal appeals could stretch until at least 2020, interfering with the Interior Department’s initial bid to sell drilling rights in the Beaufort Sea this year.

[C_U_L8R]

1. There is no 'after 2020 election' for Trump

He’d be smart to start packing.

[DonCoquixote]

2. hey florida dems

You have an attack ad now, use it. Even the GOP does not want an exxon Valdez in the Keys