President Biden’s move to permanently ban new oil and gas drilling along much of our nation’s coastlines is a bold and courageous act we celebrate. If we truly want to stop our climate crisis, we must go even further.   

This action will protect more than 625 million new acres of ocean from offshore drilling, and extend the no-drilling zone to 200 miles out from the East Coast, much of the Pacific coastline and the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Yet the massive drilling projects Biden and Congress had already approved in oil-rich areas of Alaska and the central Gulf of Mexico will continue.

We appreciate that President Biden has followed up on his promises to curb dirty energy production, especially from federal lands and waters, and taken the fossil-fuel industry to task. For this, we thank the president as well as the courageous climate organizers and lawmakers who have held his administration to account for the last four years. Everyone who lives along coastal waters will benefit from this action. 

President-elect Trump has already announced his intentions to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and other green energy initiatives wherever he can. Yet while “drill baby drill” may ignite the MAGA faithful, pulling more oil and gas from the ground doesn’t do a thing to lower our energy bills. All it does is line the pockets of fossil-fuel companies who will export more so they can bank short-term profits for their executives and shareholders. 

And every day we delay the transition to sustainable energy costs us more: every child born since 2024 will pay as much as a million dollars over the course of their lifetime to offset the rising costs of housing, food, and insurance related to extreme weather. Damage from Hurricane Helene, which battered southern states last year, is estimated at $250 billion. In Hawaii, 102 people died when heat-induced flames suddenly engulfed the town of Lahaina in 2023. And right now in California, more than 30,000 people have been forced from their homes after wildfires engulfed coastal neighborhoods in a matter of hours.

The only thing that does lower energy costs in the long term is to fully invest in clean, reliable and renewable energy like wind and solar. And even if the next administration does nothing to advance this vision, organized people can insist that our state and local governments do. 

New York State just passed legislation to make fossil fuel companies pay $75 billion dollars to help offset the costs incurred by the extreme weather conditions caused by climate change, building on the success of similar legislation in Vermont. More states are now considering similar measures. 

Grassroots, member-led groups in the People’s Action network like Citizen Action of New York and PUSH Buffalo have been at the front lines demanding those responsible for our climate crisis pay up. And the concept of “making polluters pay” was pioneered by “the Mother of Superfund,” Lois Gibbs, in her groundbreaking advocacy for families at Love Canal in upstate New York, which forced polluters to pay for cleanup of toxic waste for the first time. The organization Gibbs founded, the Center for Health and Environmental Justice (CHEJ), is one of the nine national organizations that merged to form People’s Action in 2016. 

Members of Pennsylvania Stands Up successfully advocated to create the Whole Home Repairs program, which has used IRA dollars to pay for climate-conscious upgrades to family homes across the state. The Workers Defense Project organized to win $249.7 million to fund residential solar installations in Texas, in the wake of heat-induced electric grid failures. And groups like the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) and the West Virginia Citizen Action Group (WVCAG) are organizing rate payers to push back as utility companies like NV Energy and AEP Energy seek to charge working families more so they can keep dirty coal plants alive and build new gas plants, even when renewable alternatives are cheaper for both producers and consumers. 

Our climate emergency isn’t going away, and neither are we. That’s why we must continue to organize through initiatives like these, and pressure our representatives at every level of government to enact the measures that will open the way for cleaner and cheaper energy for us all.