© (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)FORT LAUDERDALE, - APRIL 21: Line handlers help dock the oil tanker, Texas Voyager, as it pulls into its mooring to offload its crude oil at Port Everglades on April 21, 2020 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The price of West Texas Intermediate oil futures for delivery in May fell yesterday to -$37 per barrel for the first time in history. The price continues to be at record lows as demand for crude oil has decreased amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
MIAMI-With the national political reset, environmentalists can relax about Florida's Gulf Coast because it's safe from the ravages of offshore fossil fuel hunting and drilling.
Right?
Not exactly, according to those who closely monitor the issue.
They're grateful for President Joe Biden's Day One executive order that prevents oil and gas drilling in Arctic waters and the Bering Sea. A related, leading regulatory case, League of Conservation Voters vs. Trump, is likely to end in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals due to Biden's directive.
Also, conservationists are excited about Deb Haaland becoming the first Native American Interior secretary, charged with safeguarding the nation's natural resources.
Yet they won't rest until a fixed drilling ban covers the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida's fragile and scenic west coast. An existing moratorium doesn't expire until 2032 and the Biden administration's push for clean energy production would seem to doom applications for fossil fuel leases.
Nevertheless, activists want more protection for the Gulf Coast.
"We're looking for President Biden to take his pause a step further and ensure that new leasing is permanently off the table," says Diane Hoskins of Oceana, a nonprofit ocean conservation group. "We can't just kick this can down the road, we need to close the door so that coastal communities can all breathe a little bit easier."
Drilling opponents point with alarm to safety lapses and oil spills, primarily the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. They note that Biden's Interior Department would have a hard time canceling existing leases.
BP, the oil giant that paid billions in fines and settlements after Deepwater Horizon, has ambitious plans for the central and western Gulf: a $1.3 billion expansion at the Atlantis oil field, boosting production at the Thunder Horse field by 50,000 barrels a day, and a $9 billion development at the Mad Dog 2 field.
But Dan Kish, a policy executive for the industry advocate American Energy Alliance, cautions against assuming the plans will come to fruition in the near term.
"Some of us are skeptical about what kind of rigamarole people are going to have to go through to get permits," he says. Energy producers need permits for individual projects.
"We'll see whether planned offshore expansion goes forward or not," Kish says. Given Biden's emphasis on cutting carbon emissions to counter climate change, he expects a clear departure from the Trump administration's "streamlined" approach to permitting.
Kish says the industry opposes any bans on drilling, including one contained in a bill advanced by Florida's Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. Their Florida Shores Protection and Fairness Act would put Congress' stamp on the 11-year moratorium for eastern Gulf drilling.
It would also allow Florida to share the revenue from drilling in the central and western Gulf, along with Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The revenue-sharing program is supposed to compensate Gulf States for assuming the risk of another massive oil spill.
According to Kish, the bill's revenue-sharing provision hobbles it, given the dynamics Biden has set in motion. As Gulf energy production slows, the other four states won't want to share a shrinking pot of money with Florida, he says.
While energy politics plays out, a newly identified species of the baleen whale, which inhabits a protected corner of the eastern Gulf, is headed for extinction, biologist Joe Roman wrote in a New York Times commentary.
He calls the Gulf "one of the most industrialized seas on Earth," with about 2,000 oil and gas platforms and more than 20,000 miles of active pipelines.
The Gulf whale population has dwindled to about 50, according to Roman. They live in protected waters off the Florida Panhandle; experts explain why that doesn't mean they're safe.
The Gulf is a single body of water - not discrete compartments marked "east," "central" and "west." So the devastation wrought by the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion wasn't easily contained. In fact, it hasn't ended.
The blast killed 11 workers, injured another 17, and decimated marine life with 4.9 million barrels of crude oil. Over the following decade, 210 million gallons of oil fouled 92,500 miles of the Gulf, according to a study by University of Miami researchers.
The Deepwater Horizon oil slick covered about half of the Gulf whale's habitat, Roman wrote. He describes their continuing health and reproductive problems.
"The well was off the coast of Louisiana, but the explosion impacted the coast from South Florida all the way to Texas. It wasn't isolated to one area," says Brettny Hardy, an attorney with the nonprofit EarthJustice's ocean litigation project.
In October EarthJustice sued the federal government in Maryland federal court on behalf of four conservation groups, among them the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. The objective is to force the National Marine Fisheries Service to fully assess the impact of offshore oil exploration and drilling on the whale and other endangered species in Gulf waters.
The lawsuit is part of environmentalists' strategy to focus attention on the national transition from dirty to clean energy production. "It will benefit the entire Gulf Coast and hopefully provide good-paying jobs as well," Hardy says.
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