Trump’s Offshore Drilling Obsession

It’s back—the federal government’s push to expand offshore oil drilling.

As the headline last month in the Long Island newspaper Newsday reported: “Plan for New Oil Drilling Off Fla. and Calif. Coasts.” The following day, November 22, Newsday ran a nationally-syndicated cartoon by Paul Dukinsky depicting President Trump declaring in front of a line of offshore wind turbines: “Wind Turbines Ruin the View!” Then there was Trump in front of a bunch of offshore oil drilling rigs saying: “…But Oil Rigs are Beautiful!”

The New York Times two days later ran a piece with more details headlined: “In One Week, President Makes Moves to Reshape U.S. Environmental Policy.” This involves, it noted,

“new oil and gas drilling across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters, including a remote region of the high Arctic where drilling has never taken place.” It said the “plan to hold as many as 34 sales of leases” takes in “an area more than half the size of the United States.”

On December 4, some 28 Democratic members of Congress from California sent a letter to Trump and U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying: “We stand united with the overwhelming majority of Californians who fundamentally oppose any proposal that would expand offshore drilling and risk our state’s invaluable, ecologically unique coast. This proposal, coupled with ongoing efforts to reduce federal staffing and funding for agencies that protect our environment, including for safety and oil spill response, is not only dangerous but outright reckless.”

“As we have repeatedly seen in California and other parts of the country, offshore drilling is a ticking time bomb,” they continued. “Any expansion of offshore drilling in the waters off the coast of California and the spills that would inevitably accompany it would be devastating to the communities we represent.”

The waters off the Atlantic Coast are not in the Trump administration plan, as of now.

It’s been decades since I broke the story of offshore oil drilling proposed off Long Island, where I live, which led to me writing about the federal plans to drill up and down the Atlantic Coast.

It was 1970 and I was doing investigative reporting at the daily Long Island Press. A fisherman out of Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, told me about seeing a ship in the Atlantic similar to those he had seen searching for oil in the Gulf of Mexico when he was a shrimper there.

I telephoned oil company after oil company to inquire about this and each gave a firm denial about having any interest in looking for petroleum off Long Island.

Then, as I was leaving the office, an editor yelled out that Gulf Oil was calling back. The PR man from Gulf said, yes, his company was looking for oil and gas off Long Island—and was involved in a consortium of 32 oil companies, including those which had earlier issued denials.

It was my first experience in oil industry honesty—an oxymoron.

I broke the story and stayed on it. In 1971 I got onto the first offshore oil drilling rig set up in the Atlantic, across the border in Canada.

Shell Canada invited the Suffolk County Legislature for a visit. Suffolk County constitutes the eastern 60 miles of Long Island. Opposition to offshore oil drilling off Long Island was happening with the Suffolk County Legislature in the lead, joined by environmentalists, then New York State Assembly Speaker Perry B. Duryea, Jr. of Montauk, and Congressional representatives from Long Island.

The legislators had listed my name as part of the delegation.

However, on the tarmac of the airport in Sydney, Nova Scotia, a Shell Canada executive came over to me and said: “You don’t think you’re going to get on this helicopter, Mr. Grossman.”

The group of Suffolk legislators intervened with then Legislator John Wehrenberg of Holbrook telling the Shell Canada executive: “If Karl isn’t going, we’re not going.”

There was a stand-off. The men from Shell Canada huddled. And I went on the chopper. The visit was instructive—it was clear on the rig with its equipment in preparation of a blow-out and oil spill that offshore drilling is a dicey proposition.

There were spherical capsules to eject workers in the event of an accident. And a rescue boat went round-and-round 24-hours-a-day. The man from Shell Canada told me: “We treat every foot of hole like a potential disaster.”

I thought of those movies with scenes of a “gusher” at an oil rig and it raining oil on happy workers. But on an offshore rig that “gusher” would be raining oil on the sea and life in it, and then the oil would move to shore.

The Shell Canada executive gestured to the Nova Scotia shore and said peat moss was being stockpiled to try to absorb spilled oil. On Long Island, he said, “you’d use straw.”

For years I went to hearings in the Massachusetts state capital of Boston, in the New Jersey state capital of Trenton, on Long Island, and elsewhere on the Atlantic offshore oil drilling plan and I traveled down the coast to the Florida Keys, its turquoise waters on the agenda for drilling, too. Action was being taken by states to block oil drilling in state waters (in New York three nautical miles out) and by Congress in federal waters (which extend 200 nautical miles).

Then New York State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Sag Harbor, New York, co-sponsor of a 1979 state bill, said at the time: “Tourism is a major economic driver for Long Island; we also have a very viable commercial and recreational and fishing industry. The proposal for offshore oil drilling threatens both our economy and our environment.”

Oil spills—then and now—are routine in offshore oil drilling.

The largest offshore oil rig spill ever was the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. According to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration online report about it: “The 87-day Deepwater Horizon oil spill released 3.19 million barrels (134 million gallons) of oil into the ocean….Oil rose from the wellhead on the seafloor” spreading over “1,300 miles of shoreline across five states….The cumulative extent of the surface oil slick during the course of the spill totaled 43,300 square miles (approximately equal to the size of Virginia).”

“Offshore Drilling 101” is a recent online report of the Natural Resources and Defense Council. Dated November 24, it begins: “Offshore drilling is risky business. It can have devastating impacts on oceans and coastal communities. It is also expensive. But fossil fuel companies are willing to pay the price to access the potentially large reserves under the sea floor.” Despite the notion of “a clean energy future, large swaths of our federal waters remain for sale. Until we stop sacrificing public waters to fossil fuels, we’ll continue to see disastrous oil spills…and the acceleration of our climate crisis.”

The letter from the 28 members of Congress from California also said: “In April 2025, California officially became the fourth-largest economy in the world, behind only the United States, China, and Germany in global rankings. Our economy is diverse and robust, including sectors such as tourism, recreation, fisheries, deepwater port commerce, and Department of Defense infrastructure. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California’s marine economy alone accounted for $51.3 billion in GDP and $26.7 billion in wages in 2021. The economic well-being of these sectors is dependent upon a healthy and clean coastline. Further industrialization off our coast will inevitably pollute our beaches, spelling disaster for California’s economy and detrimentally impacting the rest of the country, which relies on California as an economic engine.”

“California is all too familiar with the devastating impacts of oil spills,” it went on. “The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill remains the largest in our state’s history—and one of the landmark spills in U.S. history. Immediate damage to birds, intertidal organisms, beaches, and the economy was severe. That experience galvanized Californians and secured an unshakable commitment to protecting our coastline.”

“The more recent 2015 Refugio oil spill and 2021 Huntington Beach oil spill reinforced our strong opposition to any offshore drilling expansion,” it continued. “Our Congressional delegation, state leaders, and dozens of California municipalities and Tribes have expressed their opposition through resolutions or comment letters, along with state groups and citizens. The bipartisan consensus against expanded offshore drilling has been clear and consistent over five decades. This has resulted in current state laws that include a permanent ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along California’s 1,110-mile coastline and a prohibition on new leases for oil and gas infrastructure in state waters that enable increased oil and gas production from federal waters.”

Will the Trump administration with its call to “drill baby drill” listen?

That is highly unlikely.

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