Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told Breitbart News that she welcomes President Trump’s executive order aimed at lifting the ban on offshore drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic and Atlantic areas.
Governor Palin said, “Quashing Obama’s anti-American energy plan makes America great again. We’ve been working for years to remind people that our exceptional nation came to be by developing our God-given natural resources and by expecting reward for an unsurpassed work ethic. We capture that again when we drill, baby, drill!”
Trump’s executive order directs the U.S. Department of the Interior to review the Obama-era bans to allow “responsible development of offshore areas that will bring revenue to our treasury and jobs to our workers.”
Obama’s prohibition on new drilling in U.S. water around Alaska includes most of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, and in 31 underwater canyons in the Atlantic Ocean. President Obama enacted it last December under using the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives the president the authority to designate certain offshore areas unavailable for commercial use. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton also invoked the legislation.
President Trump said that the offshore drilling ban harms the economy. He explained, “Our country’s blessed with incredible natural resources, including abundant offshore oil and natural gas reserves, but the federal government has kept 94 percent of these offshore areas closed for exploration and production.”
Trump added, “This deprives our country of potentially thousands and thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wealth.”