A large plume of smoke rising from BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. (Gerald Herbert/AP) President Trump on Wednesday ended an eight-year-old policy to protect oceans, which was created as hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from a broken well, covering more than 65,000 square miles, killing untold numbers of wildlife and devastating fisheries in several Gulf Coast states. President Barack Obama mentioned the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest and costliest oil spill in the nation’s history, in the second sentence of an executive order that detailed the first national ocean policy and called on federal agencies to work closely with states and local governments to manage the waters off their coasts. “The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and resulting environmental crisis is a stark reminder of how vulnerable our […]