President Barack Obama’s decision to close the door to offshore drilling along the U.S. East Coast — just a year after opening it — inflicts more pain to an oil industry that’s already battered by falling prices and dropping demand. The move follows a U.S. government crackdown on methane emissions at nearly a million oil and gas wells, new mandates for fracking on public land and Obama’s rejection of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Now, with the Obama administration’s decision to rule out selling drilling rights in Atlantic waters between 2017-2022, oil and gas companies’ U.S. offshore opportunities are largely confined to territory they’ve been plumbing for decades, including Alaska’s Cook Inlet and the Gulf of Mexico, where 10 auctions are planned. Environmentalists cheered the administration’s about-face on the Atlantic, but industry leaders were furious. “The decision appeases extremists who seek to stop oil and natural gas production ,which […]