Just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, President Joe Biden decided to implement a massive offshore oil drilling ban in an attempt to sabotage Trump’s upcoming energy plan.
Trump responded quickly to Biden’s plan while talking to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, vowing to undo the drilling ban “immediately.”
Watch:
“I see it just came over that Biden has banned all oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of U.S. coastal territory. It’s ridiculous. I’ll unban it immediately,” Trump asserted. “I will unban it, I have the right to unban it immediately.”
“What’s he doing? Why’s he doing it? You know, we have that something nobody else has, nobody has to the extent that we have it and it’ll be more by the time we’re finished,” Trump claimed. “We’re gonna expand our country and it’ll be more. We have oil and gas and whether you manufacture widgets or ‘gidgets’ or whatever you happen to be doing, some countries have to work very hard to do that, we do too and we will. But we have oil and gas at a level that nobody else has and we’re gonna take advantage of it.”
“When I see somebody say he’s gonna ban 625 million acres, he doesn’t even know what that is,” Trump said astonished at Biden’s actions. “He doesn’t know what 625 million acres would look like, and we can’t let that happen to our country. It’s our greatest economic asset and we’re not gonna let that happen to our country.”
The Biden administration plans to eliminate any future drilling “along the East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, 250 million acres along the West Coast, and 44 million acres of the Bering Sea along the Alaskan Coast.”
“Today President Biden will take action to protect the entire U.S. East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, and additional portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska from future oil and natural gas leasing. In protecting more than 625 million acres of the U.S. ocean from offshore drilling, President Biden has determined that the environmental and economic risks and harms that would result from drilling in these areas outweigh their limited fossil fuel resource potential,” the White House said in a statement responding to the many questions these actions raised.