Trump's offshore oil bonanza

The administration has proposed a sweeping opening of America's waters to oil drilling. But politics and industry realities will rein in the ambitions

The Trump administration has rolled out its first five-year offshore lease plan, a highly ambitious programme that would open nearly every mile of America's coastline from California to Maine to Alaska to Florida to oil and gas drilling. It's a typically Trumpian opening gambit—flood the zone with an audacious initial proposal knowing the end result will get chopped down. The draft proposal, which covers the five years from 2019 to 2024, will now go through rounds of public hearings and negotiations with state and local politicians. The federal government has wide leeway to regulate waters more than 3 miles off the nation's coastline, but local authorities can make life difficult, if not imp