We’ve seen this act before.
When he was running for president, Donald Trump, like George Bush, Al Gore, John Kerry, and most nominees before him, went to Iowa before the state’s caucuses and endorsed crony subsidies and mandates for ethanol.
Democrats, thanks to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, blocked the federal nuclear depository in Nevada. President George W. Bush overturned a Clinton administration decision to allow energy drilling in a specific spot of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico off Alabama because it was too close to Florida, where his support in 2000 had proven precarious.
Republicans and Democrats routinely subordinate good policy to parochial politics.
Trump did it again on Tuesday. His interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, traveled to Florida and met with Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a big fundraiser for Trump, who helped deliver that crucial state to him in 2016. Zinke came out of the meeting and announced that Florida is different, and the administration wouldn’t allow drilling near the Sunshine State’s beaches.
Trump was supposed to open drilling along the entire outer continental shelf, in the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, and Arctic. After giving in to Florida, a parade of Democratic coastal governors asked for the same favor. On Wednesday, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, of South Carolina, did so too.
Everyone wants plentiful oil and natural gas, and the low prices and affordable manufacturing it brings. But commonly, people also adopt the NIMBY attitude, which stands for “not in my backyard.” (Alaska is a perennial exception).
But nobody was suggesting drilling in Florida’s backyard. Drilling “off the coast of Florida” may even be a misnomer. Somewhere off the coast of the United States lies Europe. In other words, real meaning depends on distance.
Here’s some background:
States control the waters closest to their shore, and further out are federal waters. Off the Atlantic Coast, the first three miles are state waters. That’s beyond the horizon, so oil rigs in federal waters “off the coast of Florida” would not be visible from the beach. In the Gulf of Mexico, state waters extend much farther, but still only 12 miles. There are no federal waters close in.
Florida, though, has long exerted a veto on drilling anywhere remotely close to its shores. While the Western Gulf near Texas, and Central Gulf, where the Mississippi River empties, have plentiful drilling, the Eastern Gulf has long been off limits to exploration.
The Bush administration confirmed a 125-mile buffer zone off Florida, extending into the Central Gulf, where drilling is banned.
Despite this, of course, Floridians get as much oil and natural gas as anyone else. There’s even a federally permitted pipeline carrying oil from New Orleans (where Gulf drilling is allowed) to Tampa (where it isn’t). Florida is the “Not I, said the fly” character from the old fable, unwilling to participate in production but happy to consume what’s produced.
Why won’t Trump and Zinke end this privilege? The simplest answer is, politics.
Gov. Scott wants to run for Senate this year against incumbent Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson. Nelson, who of course favors the Trump-Zinke-Scott decision, nevertheless cursed it as a “political stunt.” It’s hard to disagree. Scott gets to claim a victory (elect me, I am an effective advocate for Florida), and Trump might get a bounce in Florida in 2020.
We’re all for state input into federal lands policy, whether it be designation of national monuments or where to drill. Texas’s Gulf coast has a different culture and a different economy than Florida’s, and federal rules should acknowledge that. But that doesn’t require giving Florida’s governor a 125-mile veto over drilling in areas closer to Alabama than to Pensacola.
Florida already controls 12 miles off its coasts. A sensible energy policy that respects federalism could accommodate a larger buffer zone of, say, 60 miles, and would focus exploration on the most promising parts of the Eastern Gulf. The ocean waters around the Florida Keys, for instance, aren’t thought to be high in oil value, but they are high in tourism value. By all means, take them off the table to please the Floridians.
But what Zinke has offered Florida isn’t a sensible compromise or balancing of interests. It instead looks like a cynical political calculation to preserve all curbs on exploration.
Good policy respects local differences, but you can’t make good policy if you bow to any and all parochial interests. One man’s deal-making is another man’s swamp.
