Poor Ron DeSantis!! Among Shitstain's Many Executive Orders, One Opens Florida's Coastal Waters To Oil Drilling [View all]

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“Hours after his inauguration, Trump rescinded a recent executive order by former President Joe Biden that banned new oil and gas drilling leases in public waters off Florida’s coast and the eastern Gulf of Mexico,” FloridaPolitics.com reported. “The new president went a step further and issued his own order on ‘Unleashing American Energy’ that made clear that coastal waters would be open to new leases.” Trump’s own order makes no mention of any exceptions, not even for his many fans in the Florida Panhandle counties that suffered through the 2010 disaster. In fact, his whole executive order seems geared toward rushing this through as fast as possible (more on that in a minute).

He claimed this is necessary because of a “national energy emergency”— except there’s not one. During Biden’s four years in office, the oil companies set records for both oil production and oil and gas company profits. Their only emergency is finding new pockets in which they can stuff all that cash. Yet this week the U.S. Department of Energy tweeted, “As President Trump outlined in his inaugural address, the policy of the United States and the Department of Energy is once again to drill baby, drill!”

And the way he’s doing it, odds are you’ll wind up walking your beaches in a hazmat suit, scooping up brown globs of spilled oil. Bid adieu to the offshore drilling safety rules passed following the BP oil spill. Trump repealed them during his first term and Biden put them back, so you better believe Trump will repeal them again.

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Several drilling opponents I talked to asked where Florida’s Republican officeholders were in this fight. Politicians who were vocal last time have been noticeably quiet this time — for instance, Sen. Rick Scott, who hailed Trump’s return to power as “a golden age.” But a few have spoken up. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is such a Trump fanatic that she’s filed a bill to have his face added to Mount Rushmore. But she saw the Deepwater Horizon spill’s damage firsthand, so she wants a permanent ban on drilling in the eastern Gulf. “We have a very unique ecosystem in the state of Florida that is untouched, and we have to ensure that it stays that way,” she told WFLA-TV.

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https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/01/30/trump-tries-to-expand-offshore-drilling-off-floridas-gulf-coast/