A group of restoration companies has filed a complaint against the Trump administration in an effort to stop it from allowing more cutting off the nation’s shores, including in California.
The organization criticized President Donald Trump’s “illegal order to open protected areas of the ocean for upcoming oil and gas leasing.”
Among those in the match is the San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation, which contends that onshore cutting threatens marine life, southern economy, and the society.
” Offshore digging is a dirty and detrimental practice that is a clear threat to our growing sea entertainment economy”, Chad Nelsen, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, said in a statement. Offshore digging is opposed by the majority of Americans who want to shield the shores of our country from oil and gas development.
The petition is in reaction to , Trump’s executive order in his first time in office , that seeks to rescind Biden’s permanent safeguards to reopen the beach to digging, Nelsen said.
In January,  , then-President Joe Biden ordered a ban on new oil and gas drilling, including along the California beach, arguing the challenges far outweigh the benefits.
The motion, only before Biden’s word ended, was done using his power under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, or OCSLA, to impede an region greater than 625 million hectares, the largest departure in U. S. history.
The protections he recommended limit fresh offshore cutting and rent of natural gas along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the southeast Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.
For Southern Californians, the repercussions of a 25, 000-gallon , oil spill , off Huntington Beach in 2021 are still fresh, an incident that killed wildlife and shut down beaches and coastal fishing for weeks.
A$ 50 million settlement was reached in class action claims made by local fishing interests, tourism companies and homeowners, with millions more paid to government agencies.
Since 1969, off-shore leases have been prohibited in California waters, typically within 3 nautical miles of the coast, and the area’s last federal lease sale occurred in 1984.
About 30 leases that are decades old are still in effect in Southern California.
Nearly 400 municipalities and more than 2,300 elected officials from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts have formally opposed the expansion of offshore drilling in these areas, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
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