Outgoing President Joe Biden is deliberately undermining his successor, president-elect Donald J. Trump, with his final climate decrees.
With two weeks left in office, Biden is trying to permanently codify his extreme net-zero policies ahead of Trump being sworn into office. These include permanently forbidding new oil and gas leases, enacting more appliance bans, and closing off more public lands to multiple uses.
Forbidding New Offshore Oil and Gas Leases
Unsurprisingly, President Biden is pre-emptively derailing Mr. Trump’s “drill baby drill” energy agenda that is expected to unleash more domestic production of conventional oil and gas.
News of Biden’s midnight executive order to pre-emptively block new bidding and exploration of offshore oil and gas leases across 625 million acres is egregious – threatening jobs, our national security, and even conservation.
Biden is leaning on the 70-plus year-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs offshore oil and gas activities, to justify permanently banning new leasing areas. Bloomberg News reported about the law’s withdrawal provision, writing, “Supporters of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which governs offshore oil and gas development, note that Congress included a provision giving presidents wide discretion to permanently protect waters from leasing, but it didn’t explicitly grant them the authority to undo those designations.
The Bloomberg report also added, “Though presidents have modified decisions from their predecessors to exempt areas from oil leasing, courts have never validated a complete reversal — and until Trump, no president had even attempted one.”
By undermining offshore oil and gas activities, Biden is also jeopardizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) - an important conservation program funded by royalties collected from offshore oil and gas development activities at no cost to American taxpayers. It was then-President Trump who signed the Great American Outdoors Act of 2020 to permanently fund this program, who is expected to bolster the law once he returns to office.
So much for being a pro-conservation president!
More Last-Minute Gas-Powered Appliance Bans
Washington Free Beacon reporter Thomas Catennaci published an explosive report about Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) targeting gas-powered water heaters.
Catenacci reported that Granholm’s agency published the finalized rules on December 26th without an accompanying press release. He wrote, “Overall, under the regulations, roughly 40 percent of the new tankless water heaters available in the United States today will be taken off the market by 2029. Experts and industry officials say that will force consumers to purchase either more expensive or less efficient water heater models.”
Over the last four years, the Biden-Harris administration targeted at least 15 common household appliances under the guise of achieving net-zero climate targets. However, there are few economic and environmental benefits that result from these very rules.
Regarding tankless water heaters, American consumers are expected to shell out an additional $450 for more “climate-friendly” heaters. Overall, Biden-era regulations are expected to add, at minimum, $9,000 in additional costs to to fight the so-called “climate crisis.”
Let’s hope the courts reject these standards, as they have other Biden household appliance directives.
Biden Abusing the Antiquities Act, Just As Obama Did
In line with his 30--by-30 initiative - or sanitized “America the Beautiful” plan - President Biden is issuing blanket national monument designations beyond Section II of the Antiquities Act that states national monuments “shall be confined to the smallest area compatible…”
Last week, it was revealed that Biden wants to designate two new monuments in California and possibly expand Joshua Tree National Park. The Washington Post reports the move is geared towards honoring Native American tribes.
There is debate over how to interpret what “smallest area compatible” means. Does it mean 50,000 acres, or over one million acres? If left to current interpretation, it’s allowed presidents like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, to designate millions of multiple-use public land acres as national monuments without consulting affected people. Supporters of blanket monument designations, however, don’t fully grasp the scope of the law: It not only allows expansion but also reduction of monuments, too.
The progressive Brookings Institution wrote that presidents - including Donald Trump - have the authority to diminish national monuments. They explained, “The Antiquities Act does not engage the issue of diminishment. However, that does not mean that such power cannot be implied.”
Brookings also noted Trump wasn’t the sole diminisher-in-chief: “President Trump is in pretty good company. John Yoo and Todd Gaziano note in a compelling article on this topic that in addition to there being “many other reductions or adjustments to boundaries,” Presidents Eisenhower, Truman, Taft (on multiple occasions), Wilson, and Coolidge reduced national monuments significantly. None of those diminishments were reversed by courts.”
Even the Supreme Court said presidential authority prescribed under the law must be revisited, with Chief Justice Roberts arguing in 2021 that challenges could be warranted since the law “has been transformed into a power without any discernible limit.”
President Trump is expected to enact a bold energy and conservation agenda to boost domestic production of reliable energy without imperiling conservation efforts. But President Biden’s last-minute meddling could derail expected reforms. Therefore, the incoming Trump-Vance administration must fight the administrative state in order to succeed.
