Parting Gift

OUTGOING US President Joe Biden’s decision to permanently ban offshore drilling in 625 million acres of ocean is a below-the-belt kick at President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to safeguard America’s energy security. Trump called the ban “ridiculous” and said he would “unban it immediately”. But a presidential ban invoking the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act makes it difficult for a future chief executive to reverse a predecessor’s order without recourse to Congress as the law doesn’t allow presidents authority to revoke such a ban.

Here’s Trump’s real problem: coastal states long ago reached a bipartisan consensus on no new drilling to preserve community livelihoods and fragile ecosystems. And the ban doesn’t affect current drilling. Moreover, Trump himself had walked back on his initial promise of expanding offshore drilling by extending a ban on future drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along three states on the Atlantic coast. Most significantly, Biden’s ban is unlikely to have any impact on oil production. Ironically, it was under him that the US reached record highs in oil production. Biden is an environmental hero or a political sadist. He cannot be both.

Missing Memorial

In the run-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the reasons it is so difficult to build a Holocaust memorial in London are being revisited. In 2021, Boris Johnson had cleared a monument near the Palace of Westminster but a court quashed the plan, citing a 1900 law. The Holocaust Memorial Garden in Hyde Park is lost in an obscure corner but, as Sam Knight writes in the New Yorker, the problem runs deeper: the British do not really regard the Holocaust as their problem. “In Britain, the Shoah has no reality, not even to the Jews,” as George Steiner had said.

Alive and Kicking

JANUARY 7, 2015, WAS an inflection point for France and Europe. It was the death of French innocence and naïveté as far as the battle between laïcité and Islamist militancy was concerned. It was also the beginning of an Islamist wave that unleashed itself on France and the Continent, in various degrees of violence, unlike the standalone mass terrorist acts in Madrid in March 2004 or London in July 2005. On January 7, 2015, 11 people died for their words and images and another for guarding the offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

This week, Charlie Hebdo, now operating out of an office whose location is kept secret with individual staff members protected by bodyguards, brought out a memorial edition to mourn its fallen staff and to celebrate itself. Celebrate that it’s alive and hasn’t changed character. “The desire to laugh will never disappear,” wrote Laurent ‘Riss’ Saurisseau, a cartoonist who had survived the attack and is the current editor, in an editorial emphasising how optimism born of satire saw Charlie Hebdo through this decade. The cover is a man sitting on the butt of a gun against the backdrop of one word: ‘Increvable!’ (‘Indestructible!’)

Charlie HebdoDonald TrumpHolocaust Remembrance DayJoe BidenUS politics