In other environmental news, the Obama administration is expected to propose today to open up coastal waters from Virginia to Georgia for new offshore oil and gas drilling. This comes just a day after he announced a plan to protect some of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling. The Natural Resources Defense Council criticized allowing offshore drilling in the Atlantic. Bob Deans of NRDC said: “It would ignore the lessons of the disastrous BP blowout, the need to protect future generations from the dangers of climate change and the promise of a clean-energy future.”