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Surfrider, environmental groups sue Trump administration over oil protections

February 20, 2025

A coalition of conservation organizations has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in an attempt to stop it from allowing more drilling off the country’s coasts, including in California.

The group said it is challenging President Donald Trump’s “illegal order to open protected areas of the ocean to future oil and gas leasing.”

Among those in the suit is the San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation, which contends that offshore drilling threatens marine life, coastal economies, and the community.

“Offshore drilling is a dirty and damaging practice that is a direct threat to our thriving ocean recreation economy,” Chad Nelsen, CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, said in a statement. “Offshore drilling is opposed by a majority of Americans who want to protect our nation’s coasts from oil and gas development.”

The lawsuit is in response to Trump’s executive order in his first day in office that seeks to revoke Biden’s permanent protections to reopen the coast to drilling, Nelsen said.

In January, then-President Joe Biden ordered a ban on new oil and gas drilling, including along the California coastline, arguing the risks far outweigh the benefits.

The action, just before Biden’s term ended, was done using his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, or OCSLA, to restrict an area greater than 625 million acres, the largest withdrawal in U.S. history.

The safeguards he ordered restrict new offshore drilling and natural gas leasing along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.

For Southern Californians, the repercussions of a 25,000-gallon oil spill off Huntington Beach in 2021 are still fresh, an incident that killed wildlife and shut down beaches and coastal fishing for weeks.

A $50 million settlement was reached in class action claims made by local fishing interests, tourism companies and homeowners, with millions more paid to government agencies.

Already, there has been a moratorium on off-shore leases in California waters since 1969 — typically within 3 nautical miles off the coast — and the last federal lease sale in the area was in 1984.

Southern California still has about 30 existing leases offshore that are decades old.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, nearly 400 municipalities and more than 2,300 elected officials across the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts have formally opposed the expansion of offshore drilling in these areas.

Orange County Register

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Surfrider, environmental groups sue Trump administration over oil protections

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