YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: Biden’s Grand Finale

Good things are happening! Biden bans new offshore drilling projects, medical debt comes off credit reports, social security beats the odds, and Rocket Mortgage reroutes back to Earth. 

Drilling Down On Offshore Drilling

President Joe Biden announced on Monday, Jan. 6, that he will ban new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline, a parting gift that will set the outgoing president’s climate legacy in stark contrast to President-elect Donald Trump’s climate denialism. 

Biden’s order will protect 625 million acres of ocean along the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Bering Sea from the “environmental and economic risks and harms” of offshore energy extraction. Using an obscure provision of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, Biden has permanently withdrawn unperturbed land from being leased to oil and gas companies, an enormous win for environmental groups as well as protecting coastal and indigenous communities from oil spills and other environmental impacts of offshore drilling.