Donald Trump ranted about Joe Biden’s 625 million acre offshore drilling ban in the Atlantic and wrongly claimed it covered almost “the whole ocean.”
“Take an acre, you have a house on a half-acre or a quarter-acre, or an acre, you have a big deal,” the President-elect exclaimed during a wild press conference on Tuesday. “Now you multiply that by 625 million acres. That’s like... it feels like the whole ocean!”
However, Trump’s math was off by some margin.
According to National Geographic, the Atlantic Ocean covers just over 41 million square miles – which is the equivalent of around 26.3 billion acres. Those 625 million acres represent only around two percent of 26.3 billion acres – not quite the “whole ocean” as Trump claimed.
It comes after Biden, whose term expires in two weeks, used his authority under the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect offshore areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from future oil and natural gas leasing.
Around 625 million acres of federal waters were withdrawn from energy exploration by the president in a move that may require an act of Congress to undo.
Trump has previously vowed to swiftly undo Biden’s ban, as well as numerous other policies. “I’m going to put it back on day one," Trump previously told reporters at his private club in Florida, pledging to take it to the courts “if we need to."
A favorite Trump refrain during campaign rallies was to “drill baby, drill”, one of his louder applause lines on the 2024 trail.
On Tuesday, Trump also said that Biden’s offshore drilling limitation — part of a series of final actions in office by the Biden administration — was undermining his own plans once back in the Oval Office.
“You know, they told me that we’re going to do everything possible to make this transition to the new administration very smooth," Trump complained on Tuesday. “It’s not smooth.”
However, Biden’s team has extended access and courtesies to the Trump team that the Republican former president initially denied Biden after his 2020 election victory.
Trump’sincoming chief of staff Susie Wiles told Axios in an interview published Monday that Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients has been “very helpful.”
