On Wednesday, Mr. Trump will sign an executive order directing his interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, to review national monuments designated by previous presidents under the Antiquities Act of 1906, aiming to roll back the borders of protected lands and open them to drilling, mining and logging.
The president is then expected to follow up on Friday with another executive order aimed at opening up protected waters in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans to offshore drilling. The order would direct Mr. Zinke to revisit an Obama administration plan that would have put those waters off limits to drilling through 2022. Friday’s order is also expected to call for the lifting of a permanent ban on drilling in an area including many of those same waters — a measure Mr. Obama issued in December 2016 in a last-ditch effort to protect his environmental legacy from his drilling-enthusiast successor.
The moves — just before Mr. Trump’s 100th day in office — would begin to fulfill a central campaign promise to unleash a wave of new oil and gas drilling and create thousands of jobs in energy.
The reality is more complicated, experts in the law, policy and economics of energy said. The orders are not likely to lead either to significant new energy development or to job creation in the near future. With oil prices around $50 a barrel and production already glutting world markets, few oil companies are making plans to expand into costlier, riskier offshore drilling.
And the process of undoing Obama-era regulations will take more than a flick of Mr. Trump’s pen. The legal challenges that the orders will face could take years to resolve. And without additional action from Congress, they could be reversed by Mr. Trump’s successor.
