312,000 square kilometres of American federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico have been put up for auction by the Trump administration in favour of oil companies, which will be able to drill new wells.
Trump has taken yet another step in favour of the fossil fuel industry. The American government has put up for auction a vast area of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, without taking into account the environmental risks — an environment already severely tested by serious accidents, not least the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. 312,000 square kilometres (4.4 million football pitches, to give a sense of the scale) that oil and gas companies can bid for and drill in their search for fossil fuels to burn.
Despite several analyses having shown that renewables are now more cost-effective and create more jobs than fossil fuel sources, the American administration continues to invest in new drilling. In the Gulf of Mexico, oil companies have already created more than 52,000 wells and installed more than 7,000 platforms. A good number of these are inactive, yet continue to discharge varying quantities of waste into the sea — as a recent New York Times investigation found — much to the indifference of American taxpayers, who continue to foot the bill for clean-up costs and the decommissioning of old drilling infrastructure.
Oil spills and the discharge of extraction waste into the sea are a routine part of offshore drilling. The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, based on industry data, has calculated that the exploitation of the offshore area put up for auction by the Trump administration could result in around 2,700 oil spills that would discharge more than 63.2 million litres of oil into the Gulf. The figure naturally does not include spills that could result from disasters such as the one that occurred at Deepwater Horizon in 2010, in which 11 workers lost their lives along with thousands of marine animals. The environmental situation, while improving, remains extremely fragile to this day and has still not fully recovered, in part due to other accidents that have occurred in the area.
"Trump is selling off our oceans, coastal communities and marine life to the oil industry," said Kristen Monsell, oceans programme legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "Whales, dolphins and Gulf seafood are already living in oil spills and industry wastewater: more drilling and less regulation will make the next Deepwater Horizon disaster only a matter of time." It is not simply a matter of having granted the oil industry new areas for drilling; the Trump administration had the ill-advised idea of easing the safety regulations that companies are required to comply with, reducing the royalties that oil and gas companies must pay to the government and effectively expanding the possibility of offshore drilling in every ocean in the country.
Last February, the Center for Biological Diversity had already sued the Trump administration for failing to assess the negative effects on wildlife of the discharge of wastewater from oil extraction into the Gulf. A federal study conducted as part of the resolution of a lawsuit involving the same Centre found that more than 30 million marine mammals in the Gulf had been harmed by seismic exploration for oil and gas. These findings do not appear to concern the federal government, which authorises the discharge into the sea of chemicals used in fracking and other processing waste, regardless of the harm caused to wildlife: in 2014 alone — based on federal documents — more than 75 billion litres of oil wastewater were discharged into the Gulf. Toxic chemicals that can kill or harm several marine species, including marine mammals and fish, and that effectively enter the human food chain. "Trump is handing the reins of Gulf waters to oil companies with no regard for the devastating consequences," said Monsell. "This is a bad deal for people and the planet."
