September 27, 2023 — It was a whale of an announcement.
Now efforts to protect the whale are running headfirst into that other behemoth off the Gulf Coast: the offshore oil and gas industry.
The Biden administration has proposed protecting a massive swath of ocean from Texas to Florida, potentially restricting fossil fuel activity in one of the nation’s top oil-producing spots. Already Biden’s deputies sought to remove millions of acres within its habitat from an offshore oil lease sale originally scheduled for Wednesday.
Offshore oil drillers and Republican lawmakers from Gulf Coast states responded with lawsuits to stop protections they say are economically crippling and hastily executed.
A federal district judge last week agreed, ordering the Biden administration to reverse course on the upcoming lease sale. An appellate court Monday delayed the lease sale until November.
The decision to remove acreage from auction “circumvented the law, ignored science, and bypassed public input,” said Erik Milito, head of the National Ocean Industries Association, an offshore energy lobbying group.
But scientists say oil extraction still poses a clear risk to the whale, with officials estimating the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 wiped out about one-fifth of the population. With so few Rice’s whales left, the loss of even a single individual is devastating for the species.
“The science is quite clear that these whales won’t survive in an environment with such heavy industry,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. “It would just be an incredible tragedy to watch this whale species go extinct, especially so soon after we learned that it was its own species.”