WASHINGTON — In a major reversal, the Obama administration on Tuesday said it will bar oil drilling off America’s Atlantic Coast, a move cheered by environmentalists and consistent with the president’s aggressive steps to combat climate change.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the decision “protects the Atlantic for future generations.” She said the administration had listened to thousands of people in coastal communities from Florida to New England who said, “Now is not the time to start leasing off the Atlantic Coast.”
However, business groups and most Republicans criticized it as another example of what they call executive overreach.
Despite a surge in oil and natural gas production in the past seven years that has helped push gasoline prices below $2 a gallon, Republicans and industry groups have criticized President Barack Obama for imposing what they say are unnecessary regulations on drilling, especially on federal lands.
Most of the drilling boom has occurred on state and private lands and in the Gulf of Mexico, long the center of U.S. offshore oil production.
The decision reverses a proposal made last year in which the administration floated a plan that would have opened up a broad swath of the Atlantic Coast to drilling. That January 2015 proposal would have opened up sites more than 50 miles off Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia to oil drilling no earlier than 2021.
Obama, in his final year in office, is working to build an environmental legacy that includes a global agreement to curb climate change and an ambitious plan to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. He also has imposed stricter limits on smog-causing pollution linked to asthma and has rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada.
The proposal on Atlantic drilling is likely to become an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.
