Six months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at increasing offshore oil and gas drilling, the White House has received recommendations on which of America’s national marine sanctuaries and ocean monuments should be eliminated or have their boundaries reduced in size.
Among the 11 areas that could be affected and opened to oil and gas drilling, deep sea mining or other commercial activities are parts of Monterey Bay, and the Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank national marine sanctuaries off the Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino coasts.
The public, however, isn’t allowed to see the report.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sent the document Wednesday to the White House. Asked for a copy, a Commerce Department spokesman who requested anonymity said that “The report is currently undergoing final inter-agency review” and declined to say when it would be available to the public.
Environmental groups slammed the move.
“We’re in a strange new world in which documents that the public has every right to see are being withheld from public view,” said Richard Charter of Bodega Bay, a senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation, an environmental group.
“This president has made it his mission,” Charter added, “to trash the conservation legacy of not just President Obama, but also George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. It’s just an unbelievable disregard for public process, and it would kill protection for our national treasures.”
On April 28, Trump signed an executive order requiring Ross, whose department includes NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — to review any actions taken since 2007 that expanded existing national marine sanctuaries or monuments or established new ones. He was to report back to the White House in October.
“Today we are unleashing American energy and clearing the way for thousands and thousands of high-paying American energy jobs,” Trump said then at a White House ceremony.
Ross held a public comment period over this summer in which nearly 100,000 comments were received, with 99 percent in favor of retaining the existing boundaries of the protected ocean areas.
National marine sanctuaries are similar to national parks. Although fishing is allowed in most of them, oil and gas drilling is banned, as is undersea mining, and there are limits on some activities, like flying airplanes at low altitudes or salvaging shipwrecks.
Environmental groups have said that if Trump attempts to reduce the size of any of the national marine sanctuaries or ocean monuments, they will file lawsuits.
“Nothing about this feels like an honest and straightforward review, but some sort of backroom deal,” said Lance Morgan, a marine biologist and president of the Marine Conservation Institute, based in Seattle.
The oil and gas industry has not been pushing to reduce sanctuary boundaries on the West Coast. In June, California’s main oil and gas industry group said it would not submit comments on the plan.
“I am not aware of any of our members chomping at the bit to pursue the opportunity in California,” said Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, at the time.
In August, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke sent similar recommendations to Trump about whether to eliminate or shrink 27 national monuments on land that presidents established since 1997. As with the ocean report, he did not make it public. It leaked out in September, however, and recommended that at least four be reduced in size: Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, Cascade in Oregon and Gold Butte in Las Vegas.
On Friday U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, announced that Trump had called him to say he would reduce in size the two Utah monuments, in part to allow coal mining in the redrock canyons of the Grand Staircase area. White House officials say Trump plans to visit Utah in December to make the announcement.
A notice published in the Federal Register in June showed that the Trump administration is considering changes to 11 marine sanctuaries and monuments that total 425 million acres, and include habitat for whales off California, coral reefs in the South Pacific and areas of historic shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.
Marine sanctuaries established before 2007, like Monterey Bay, Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank, will not be eliminated. But expansions to them, like President George W. Bush’s action in 2008 to add Davidson Seamount, a dormant underwater volcano rich with 10-foot-tall coral forests, to the Monterey Bay sanctuary, could be revoked.
In 2015, Obama more than doubled the size of two Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank, extending them by 50 miles from the Marin County coast up the rugged Sonoma and Mendocino coasts. That expansion could be undone, clearing the way for oil drilling there. Trump also could undo protections in American Samoa, the northwest Hawaiian Islands, Thunder Bay on Lake Huron in Michigan, and Marianas Trench, Wake Island, Palmyra Atoll and other remote parts of the South Pacific.
Contact Paul Rogers at 408-920-5045.
