Carteret County sits in a region of North Carolina known as the Crystal Coast. It’s celebrated for its charming lighthouses, sun-bleached beaches, and relaxed atmosphere. The population is 89.9 percent white and staunchly Republican.
President Trump won the county in 2016 with 71 percent of the vote. But he has touched off an insurrection among the GOP faithful here on the issue of offshore drilling, which the county almost universally views as a threat to tourism. In that, Carteret is typical of areas up and down the Eastern Seaboard, where opposition to the Trump administration’s proposed plan to allow offshore drilling in nearly all U.S. coastal waters has become a top issue in the 2018 midterms. While coastal Republicans’ support for Trump remains strong, their opposition to drilling underscores the limits of his support when local pocketbook and quality-of-life issues are at stake.
We’re very conservative here, said Tom Kies, the president of the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce. [It’s] a very Republican county. But people are very aware how important tourism, and the quality of life, is for our market, he continued. That really is our life blood.
Trump’s Interior Department released its plan for offshore drilling in January, which would open up more than a billion acres in the Arctic and along the Eastern Seaboard. A revised version is expected to come out this fall.
In Carteret County, six municipalities have already passed resolutions opposing offshore drilling and seismic testing, a controversial technique used to pinpoint petroleum deposits in the ocean floor. So have local governments in other states.
Everyone is pretty much united in opposition, Kies explained. And with the midterms approaching, Republicans up and down the ballot are breaking from the party line to oppose the president’s proposed plan.
I believe in Donald Trump. I believe in Make America Great Again. We just disagree on [offshore drilling], Bobby Hanig, a Republican running for the North Carolina statehouse, told WUNC North Carolina Public Radio.
Until recently, many East Coast politicians supported offshore drilling. In 2011, three Gulf Coast Republican governors and Alaska Governor Sean Parnell formed the Outer Continental Shelf Governor’s Coalition, aimed at promoting the expansion of offshore drilling. By 2013, three more Republican governors joined in: South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, and North Carolina’s Pat McCrory. In 2014, the coalition met with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to urge drilling expansion. Each of these moves received little opposition from the public.
Nobody really knew. Nobody was paying attention, said Frank Knapp, the former president of the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast.
But in 2015, when Jewell’s department released its draft of the Oil and Gas Leasing Program, people did notice. If enacted, the five-year plan would have opened up huge portions of the South Atlantic to drilling for the first time, and outrage quickly spread along the East Coast. In Republican and Democratic areas alike, residents, legislators, and advocacy organizations held town halls, protested on beaches, and lobbied Washington. The military expressed concern that drilling would impact their operations off of Florida and Virginia. By the end of 2016, the Obama administration revised its plan, removing the Atlantic from the leasing program, and invoked an obscure law to ban drilling in much of the Atlantic and the Arctic.
2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group