Judge restores Obama-era ban on offshore drilling in Arctic

WASHINGTON — In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge in Alaska ruled that an executive order by Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.

The decision Friday by U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason found that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal from drilling of about 120 million acres of Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

The decision, which is expected to be appealed, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Va., to the Canadian border.

Most immediately, the decision will force the Interior Department to withdraw the waters of the Arctic Ocean from its forthcoming plan detailing where the federal government intends to lease federal waters to oil companies for offshore drilling. A draft of that plan published last year called for drilling off the entire U.S. coastline.

Although the court decision relates specifically to a law on offshore drilling, it could also hamstring Trump’s efforts to erase or reduce the creation of large protected areas of public lands by previous presidents.