President Barack Obama just made millions of acres of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans off limits to oil and gas drilling. The president used a 1953 law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to safeguard 3.8 million acres of the Atlantic Ocean off of the East Coast of the United States — from southern Virginia to off of Cape Cod. This 1953 act allows the Department of the Interior to govern which companies have the rights to drill into the ocean floor more than three miles off the coast of the U.S. — which is under federal, and not state, control.