国际英语资讯:Spotlight: Trump offshore drilling plans met with disbelief from coast to coast_时事

国际英语资讯:Spotlight: Trump offshore drilling plans met with disbelief from coast to coast

Newsom said California's coastline is managed by the state's land commission and they have been actively working since April 2016 to "create an environmental rampart" to stop the expected executive action.

California effectively blocked new drilling operations after 1969 when a Union Oil Co. spill off Santa Barbara drenched 35 miles (59.5 kilometers) of coastline with more than three million gallons of crude oil.

"California's door is closed to President Trump's Pacific oil and gas drilling," Newsom said in a written statement Thursday.

"AMERICAN ENERGY DOMINANCE"

U.S. Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke glorified the plan as part of a larger, federal goal of "achieving American Energy Dominance" and competing with other oil-rich nations.

Studies say that at least 18 billion barrels of oil can be produced from areas that are currently off-limits - enough to fuel the country for almost three years - and thereby reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

Zinke told reporters that those restrictions have cost America billions of U.S. dollars in lost revenue and said the new proposal would make about 90 percent of those waters available for leasing.

After the wake of a 1980 spill that gushed five million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Congress imposed a moratorium on drilling in 1981 that shut down most of the nation's coastlines.

The BP-Deepwater Horizon accident killed 11 workers triggering the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history and one of the country's worst environmental calamities.