Biden Climate Event Blown Off Course
LOS ANGELES — President Joe Biden flew all the way across the country this week in hopes of making a final splashy announcement to cement his climate legacy — and potentially wresting a bit of attention away from President-elect Donald Trump.
But the climate had other plans.
A planned trip to the eastern Coachella Valley here to designate two new national monuments on Tuesday was waylaid by an increasingly dangerous windstorm, forcing Biden to cancel a major event announcing plans to shield more than 800,000 acres across California from oil and gas drilling.
The storm could be one of the most destructive to hit the region in a decade, meteorologists warned, with gusts in some areas accelerating to nearly 100 miles per hour.
Biden will instead deliver a speech establishing the Chuckwalla National Monument and Sáttítla National Monument at the White House next week, ensuring that "key stakeholders" can still attend, the White House said.
The new monuments would be the 13th and 14th that Biden has created during his term — moves that would collectively protect a land and ocean area nearly four times the size of Texas from oil and gas drilling.
The Chuckwalla monument, outside Joshua Tree National Park in southern California, will create the largest corridor of protected land in the continental U.S. The Sáttítla monument in the far north of the state will encompass a massive dormant volcano and its surrounding highlands.
Biden has prioritized expanding federal land protections during his term, a push that has drawn praise from environmental advocates and local Native tribes lobbying to protect sacred land from energy development. It's part of a last-minute conservation push that has already drawn sharp criticism from Trump, who on Tuesday blasted Biden's move earlier this week to ban offshore drilling across 625 million acres of ocean.
"They're trying everything they can to make it more difficult," Trump told reporters at a press conference Tuesday morning, pledging to immediately reverse the ban.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday downplayed the impact of the offshore drilling ban on energy development, arguing that the newly protected area has "relatively minimal fuel potential" that didn't outweigh the environmental and health costs of new drilling.