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Well, that sure didn't take long. On Tuesday, not even a week after he introduced the Trump administration's aggressive new 5-year plan for oil and gas leasing in the federal OCS, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced he was summarily taking any acreage in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico that might impact the state of Florida out of the package.
The announcement came after Sec. Zinke had met with Florida Governor Rick Scott in Tallahassee, and in the face of bi-partisan opposition from Florida's elected officials to the initial proposed plan. Indeed, within a few minutes of Zinke's January 4 press conference announcing the plan, both Florida U.S. senators — Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Ben Nelson — had leapt in front of the nearest TV camera and microphone to announce their opposition, and Governor Scott wasn't far behind them.
None of this should come as any surprise at all to anyone who is familiar with Florida's history of opposition to drilling for oil and natural gas in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. The Eastern Gulf of Mexico has long been known to contain large quantities of oil and natural gas reserves, but while some leasing and drilling has taken place there, getting at the oil and gas has proven to be logistically difficult and expensive, since the major ports that stage the movement of men and equipment out into the Gulf are in Texas and Louisiana.
Still, the federal government has for more than two decades been interested in trying to make money from the Eastern Gulf. Shortly after George W. Bush became President and Gale Norton had been sworn in as Interior Secretary, DOI put forth a 5-year plan that would offer about 6 million acres in the Eastern Gulf for leasing. This same 6 million acres had been offered without many takers in the previous 5-year plan, which had been implemented by the Bill Clinton Administration in 1997.
When a Democrat President first offered that plan in 1996, when Democrat Lawton Chiles was Governor of Florida, no one on the environmental left uttered a peep in protest. But in 2001, a Republican had just been elected to the presidency, and another Republican was Governor of Florida. Even worse, that Governor was the President’s own brother, Jeb Bush, who was getting ready to start running for re-election in 2002. Talk about giving the anti-oil and gas lobby fodder for getting the public ginned up – it was pretty much the perfect storm.
Smelling a golden opportunity for raising contributions, all the usual suspects among the environmental conflict group community sent their activists down to Florida to do what they do best: create conflict. And they did so very effectively.
Within weeks, transplanted New Yorkers and New Jerseyans in retirement golfing communities up and down Florida’s West Coast began putting pressure on the state's congressional delegation and Governor Bush to oppose the plan. Gov. Bush initially tried to do some public education on the issue, in the belief that reason would prevail, but that wasn’t going to fly. The rabble had been fully roused and the conflict group coffers were filling up, which meant that Bush’s efforts to calm people down only got them more ginned up.
By May, 2001, Gov. Bush's polling numbers were looking a little shaky, and Americans were treated to the spectacle of a Republican President being lobbied by a Republican Governor who happened to be his own brother to force major revisions to the OCS 5-year plan for purely political considerations. Jeb wanted to get re-elected, and he knew he’d lose if that leasing plan went final. NIMBY had taken firm hold in Florida.
Gov. Bush's efforts ultimately led to the July 3, 2001 announcement from the Bush Administration that the 6 million Eastern Gulf of Mexico acres initially included in the new 5-year plan would be pared down to less than 2 million acres that were adjacent to the coast of Alabama, not Florida.
Apparently, the Trump Administration must have thought that the passage of 17 years might have led to a dimming of memories about that last dust-up over leasing off the coast of Florida. They were wrong. In fact, the damage done to the Florida coast by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident is still fresh on Floridians' minds, and it's hard to criticize that.
Of course, while Florida's elected officials don't want to share any risks of producing oil and natural gas, it's fair to note that Floridians sure don't mind consuming oil and gas with great gusto. This is a state in which fully 2/3rds of power generation is provided by natural gas, the overwhelming preponderance of which must be shipped into the state via pipeline since Florida produces very little natural gas of its own. It is also a state that is home to the third-most gasoline powered automobiles in the U.S., and whose residents just a few months ago suffered the effects of gasoline shortages due to a major hurricane event. One would have thought that incident might also be fresh on Floridians' minds, but memories are fickle things.
So the politics around the Eastern Gulf of Mexico were hard, and Secretary Zinke obviously made the judgment that this part of his overall leasing plan was not worth the fight. The Administration is also getting pushback on its plans to open up OCS areas along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts from state officials in California, Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, Virginia and others. It will be interesting to see how much political heat Secretary Zinke will be willing to take to keep those new areas for leasing in the plan.
If Tuesday's developments in Florida are any indication, we may have the answer to that in a matter of days.
