Republican states take Biden’s offshore drilling ban to court

Several Republican-led states have filed a lawsuit to challenge the offshore drilling ban recently imposed by outgoing US president Joe Biden.

The lawsuit claims that Biden had no authority to impose the ban and that such a decision had to be made in the US Congress. It also demands a reversal of Biden’s decision with declaratory and injunctive relief.

Through executive orders, Biden blocked all future oil and gas drilling in more than 2.5m sq km of federal waters earlier this month.

With the decision, federal oil and gas leasing was banned across large parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Northern Bering Sea. In total, the ban closed off an area equal to around a quarter of the total land mass of the United States.

The court filing, filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, sees Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland as defendants while the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, and Mississippi named the plaintiffs along with the American Petroleum Institute and the Gulf Energy Alliance.

The ban was done through the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives the sitting president the power to withdraw federal waters from future leasing. Such a ban cannot be undone without an act of Congress, so Trump – who will be sworn in today as the 47th president of the United States – will not be able to do it on his own.

Trump has already stated that he would attempt to immediately revoke the ban and even use the courts to achieve that.