From Watts Up With That?

Guest “And just like that, it’s the Gulf of America” by David Middleton

BOEM’s Gulf of America OCS Region

Our mission: To manage development of U.S. Outer Continental Shelf energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way.

The Gulf of America Region (GOAR) manages three programs on the Gulf of America Outer Continental Shelf (OCS): oil and gas, renewable energy and marine minerals. The GOAR manages offshore resources in Federal waters off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Nearly three-fourths of the Gulf of America employees are scientists including geologists, geophysicists, petroleum engineers, physical scientists, biologists, environmental protection specialists, and environmental scientists.

What is the Gulf of America OCS?

The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) gives BOEM the authority to manage the OCS and the requirement to provide environmental oversight. The Gulf continues to be the nation’s primary offshore source of oil and gas, generating about 97% of all U.S. OCS oil and gas production. OCS activities generate substantial revenues from lease sales, royalties on production, and rental fees. These funds are distributed to the U.S. Treasury and several different programs through various revenue sharing laws. The largest portion goes to the General Fund of the U.S. Treasury, which benefits all U.S. citizens through funding of daily operations of the federal government. 

BOEM held the first-ever offshore wind energy auction for the OCS Gulf of America region in 2023, resulting in one lease area receiving a high bid of $5.6 million. RWE Offshore US Gulf, LLC was the winner of the Lake Charles Lease Area, which has the potential to generate approximately 1.24 gigawatts of offshore wind energy capacity and power nearly 435,400 homes with clean, renewable energy.

The Marine Minerals Program partners with communities to address serious erosion along the Nation’s coastal beaches, dunes, barrier islands, and wetlands. Erosion affects natural resources, energy, defense, public infrastructure, and tourism. To help address this problem, the MMP leases sand, gravel and/or shell resources from federal waters on the OCS for shore protection, beach nourishment, and wetlands restoration with vigorous safety and environmental oversight.

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)

More good news!

BOEM Rescinds Expanded Rice’s Whale Protection Efforts

Release Date 02/20/2025

Contact(s) Brian Walch

Phone (202) 710-7994

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) today announced it is rescinding its Notice to Lessees and Operators (NTL) 2023-G01, Expanded Rice’s Whale Protection Efforts During Reinitiated Consultation with NMFS [National Marine Fisheries Service]. The NTL contained recommendations for suggested precautionary measures by lessees and operators during the reinitiated consultation. 

The NTL is being rescinded in response to Secretary’s Order 3418, Unleashing American Energy.

Information on NTLs is available at BOEM’s Guidance Portal: https://www.boem.gov/about-boem/regulations-guidance/guidance-portal.  

— BOEM —

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) manages development of U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way.

BOEM

The Biden administration attempted to illegally remove the “Rice’s Whale Expanded Area” (dark blue area on map below) from all future, lease sales.

Rice’s whales are primarily located in the yellow and back outlined area in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, an area off-limits to oil & gas exploration. Prior to 2021, Rice’s whales were thought to be a local subpopulation of the unendangered Bryde’s whales.

The US offshore oil & gas industry has now been “un-Bidened by what” has been…

Biden: I Wanted ‘to Stop All Drilling’ on the Coasts and Gulf, Got Blocked by Courts

by IAN HANCHETT 8 Aug 2023

During an interview with The Weather Channel that is set to air on Wednesday, a portion of which aired on Tuesday, President Joe Biden said that he “wanted to stop all drilling on the East Coast and the West Coast and in the Gulf” but was blocked by the courts from doing so.

[…]Breitbart

The court battles will continue. The Enviromarxist agitators are already forum and judge shopping to file more nuisance lawsuits in districts and before judges who have long track records of siding against industry and capitalism in general. However, unlike the past four years, the Federal government will be aggressively defending the law and we won’t have to rely on the API, NOIA, Louisiana and Chevron to fight back. We can only hope that the Supreme Court will finally figure out that these NGO’s do not have standing to sue anyone on behalf of the planet. The current Supreme Court might just be inclined to deny standing to the agitators.

Abstract

 The topic of this article is not a happy one. Until very recently, the Court’s environmental rulings during the past five decades reflected the views of its consistently conservative majority, but were nonetheless tempered by moderate conservative Justices who, bounded by pragmatic concerns, were contextually open to account for the environmental protection exigencies present in particular cases. In the past few years, however, that dynamic has significantly shifted as the Court’s majority has increasingly been captured by Justices whom I dub “constitutional alarmists” — motivated in their votes and reasoning by their shared perception that environmental laws peculiarly threaten no less than the constitutional foundations of how law should be made and applied.

The purpose of this article is to describe this disturbing development while placing it in historical perspective. To that end, the article is divided into three parts. Part I highlights the central reason why environmental lawmaking is so challenging for our lawmaking institutions, including for the Supreme Court. As described in Part I, the making and application of environmental protection laws systematically present the Court with difficult questions regarding the Constitution’s allocation of lawmaking authority both between branches and between levels of government and the Bill of Rights’ imposition of limits on laws that interfere with personal liberty and private property. Part II considers how the Court generally resolved these legal issues over five decades from roughly October Term 1970, the dawning of modern environmental law in the United States, through the close of October Term 2019, immediately before President Trump added his third Justice to the Court. It describes how and why there was some modicum of balance in the Court’s environmental rulings during those five decades, notwithstanding a persistent conservative majority. Finally, Part III considers the Court’s environmental rulings since the fall of 2020, when the Court became dominated by six Justices who, alarmed by the threats they perceive environmental lawmaking to present to the Constitution’s very foundation, are joining majority opinions that unravel environmental law’s past successes and erode its future promise.

Lazarus, 2024

“Constitutional alarmists”? Don’t you just love it when smug leftists come up with phrases like “basket of deplorables” or “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”…

Thank you Professor Lazarus for adding “constitutional alarmists” to the left’s growing lists of unintentional compliments they’ve paid to hard working, patriotic Americans!. This deplorable garbage is now a proud constitutional alarmist! Having read pretty well all of the Federalist Papers penned by James Madison, I’m fairly certain that our Federal government was supposed to be operated by constitutional alarmists.

President Trump will likely have the opportunity to replace Justices Thomas (76) and Alito (74) with much younger “constitutional alarmists” (hopefully more like Gorsuch than Cavanaugh). He or his successor, J.D. Vance, might even get the opportunity to replace Justice Sotomayor (70) and Chief Justice Roberts (70).

Reference

Lazarus, Richard, The Rise of Constitutional Alarmists on the Supreme Court and Its Portent for the Future of Environmental Law 85 Ohio St. L. J. ____ (forthcoming 2024) (July 13, 2024). Harvard Public Law Working Paper Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: 

https://ssrn.com/abstract=4893459 or 

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4893459