Conservationists sue over Trump dump of offshore drilling bans

(CN) — Conservation groups took aim at President Donald Trump’s attempt to roll back ocean protections on Wednesday, with a new lawsuit and a motion to reignite a lawsuit from the president’s first term filed in Alaska federal court.

“Trump is illegally trying to take away protections vital to coastal communities that rely on clean, healthy oceans for safe living conditions, thriving economies and stable ecosystems,” Steve Mashuda, Earthjustice managing attorney for oceans, said in a statement.

Earthjustice represents many of the conservation group plaintiffs in the new lawsuit that seeks to halt Trump from reversing ocean protections enacted by the previous administration.

Before leaving office in January, President Joe Biden invoked his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect around over 670 million acres of land and water from future oil and natural gas leasing. Of the area conserved, over 625 million acres specifically protect areas off the eastern Gulf, Atlantic, Pacific and Alaska coasts from offshore drilling.

On Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order rescinding 68 executive orders and 11 presidential memoranda from the Biden administration, including those protecting ocean areas.

The conservation groups — including Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Alaska Wilderness League, Oceana Inc., Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, Healthy Gulf, Center for Biological Diversity, Turtle Island Restoration Network, Natural Resources Defense Council Inc., and Greenpeace Inc. — accuse the president of exceeding both his constitutional and statutory authority by issuing the sweeping executive order revoking the protections.

“Trump’s putting our oceans, marine wildlife and coastal communities at risk of devastating oil spills and we need the courts to rein in his utter contempt for the law,” Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Opening up more public waters to the oil industry for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems.”

Under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, enacted in 1953, the president has the authority to limit leasing activity. The groups argue that nowhere in the act is a provision allowing a president to undo such withdrawals.

This is not Trump’s first attempt to revoke previous presidents’ withdrawals. In 2017, an Alaska federal court shut down his attempt to revoke President Barack Obama’s protections for the Arctic Ocean and portions of the Atlantic Ocean.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason found presidents have the power to remove certain lands from development but don’t have the power to revoke the removals of their predecessors.

On Wednesday, the conservation groups that secured the win in the case filed a new motion asking Gleason to reinstate her order and judgment against Trump, which was dismissed as moot after Biden took office and rescinded the executive order in contention.

“We defeated Trump the first time he tried to roll back protections and sacrifice more of our waters to the oil industry,” Mashuda said. “We’re bringing this abuse of the law to the courts again.”

The groups involved in the 2017 lawsuit — League of Conservation Voters, Defenders of Wildlife, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Greenpeace and Alaska Wilderness League — say Trump’s executive order upended the core reasoning behind the court’s dismissal and the reinstatement of the original executive order is the “unexpected reality in 2025.”

Martha Collins, executive director of Healthy Gulf, noted Trump himself used the same authority to ban offshore drilling along the Florida coastline during his first term.

“President Biden simply made those protections permanent, something President Trump did not do,” Collins said in a statement. “President Trump has now shown he could care less about protecting the eastern Gulf or Florida.”

The federal Outer Continental Shelf, which typically starts where state water ends and extends 200 nautical miles from shore consists of approximately 2.5 billion acres. The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act grants the Secretary of the Interior managing power over oil and gas activities on the Outer Continental Shelf and directs offshore development to abide by environmental safeguards.

“The Arctic Ocean has been protected from U.S. drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts,” Sierra Weaver, senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement. “Though these coastlines have been protected, the administration is showing no restraint in seeking to hand off some of our most fragile and pristine landscapes for the oil industry’s profit.”