Don is universally agreed to be an idiot but hey, he can still destroy all the coasts.

The Trump administration said Thursday it would allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all United States coastal waters, giving energy companies access to leases off California for the first time in decades and opening more than a billion acres in the Arctic and along the Eastern Seaboard.

The proposal lifts a ban on such drilling imposed by President Barack Obama near the end of his term and would deal a serious blow to his environmental legacy. It would also signal that the Trump administration is not done unraveling environmental restrictions in an effort to promote energy production.

Many states are not pleased, including some with Republican governors…

…like Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, where the tourism industry was hit hard by the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster in 2010 that killed 11 people and spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Governor Scott vowed on Thursday to protect his state’s coast from drilling, saying he would raise the issue with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

It might help to mention that Mar-a-Lago is in Florida.

The governors of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, California, Oregon and Washington have all opposed offshore drilling plans.

Notice that’s the entire west coast (of the lower 48). The east coast is much spottier.

Oil industry leaders cheered the reversal, calling it long overdue.

“I think the default should be that all of our offshore areas should be available,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance. “These are our lands. They’re taxpayer-owned and they should be made available.”

Interesting idea of “our” and “owned” and “available.” There are of course many of us who think it can mean ours to enjoy and cherish in their natural state complete with resident wildlife, as opposed to ours to exploit and ravage in order to make global warming worse.

[F]or now, Republicans’ efforts to roll back restrictions on energy production are winning the day. Last month Congress opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to oil and gas drilling as part of the tax overhaul. And last week the Interior Department rescinded an Obama-era rule that would have added regulations for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on federal and tribal lands. It also repealed offshore drilling safety regulations that were put in place after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Oh, brilliant. Make sure there are fewer safety regulations when it comes to drilling for oil off the coast, because who doesn’t want another Deepwater Horizon spill?