Citing “the urgency of the climate crisis,” President Biden recently banned oil and gas drilling over an expanse of thirteen million acres in the western Arctic, including forty percent of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The President has also nixed a proposed 211-mile road to access major copper and zinc mine proposals.
The administration’s action keeps roads out of the Brooks Range and lands of the caribou and grizzly bear, and salmon spawning streams. “These natural wonders deserve our protection: As the climate crisis imperils communities across the country, more must be done,” Biden said in a supporting statement.
Specifically, the drilling ban is designed to protect the lifestyle and subsistence hunting rights of native villages in the vast wilderness north of Fairbanks. It will, in words of U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, safeguard “the way of life for the indigenous people who have called this special place home from time immemorial.”
It is also designed, in the near term, to relieve political pressure on the Biden-Harris administration. The environmental community was deeply upset last year when the administration approved ConocoPhillips’ $8 billion Willow Project, designed to put 200 wells on three drilling pads on the North Slope west of Prudhoe Bay.
The ban, timed to Earth Day, is bitterly opposed by Alaska’s congressional delegation. It constitutes “national security suicide” and a “lawless” Biden exceeded his authority doing it, Senator Dan Sullivan, R‑Alaska, said on CBS’ Face the Nation, adding: “Natural resources, energy, critical minerals – that’s Alaska’s strength. This should concern all kinds of Americans.”
The twenty-three-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve was created one hundred and one years ago by President Warren G. Harding on his 1923 trip to Alaska. It was designed as an energy supply source for U.S. Navy ships. Harding visited Seattle afterwards and would soon die in his San Francisco hotel room. The Biden drilling ban comes at a time when the United States is producing more oil than any other country on Earth, with gasoline prices down $1.35 a gallon from two years ago.
“It’s no secret that the Reserve – a vast region of tundra and wetlands teeming with wildlife – has frequently landed in the crosshairs of the insatiable fossil fuels industry,” said Jeremy Lieb, attorney with Earthjustice: We applaud his (Biden’s) move and call for even bolder action to keep the fossil fuel industry out of the Arctic for the sake of the climate and for future generations.”
Joe Biden wasn’t a leading environmentalist during his thirty-six-year tenure in the U.S. Senate, but has come by the faith in the White House. In Alaska alone, he has halted road building into old growth trees of the Tongass National Forest, blocked a huge open pit mine sited between two prime Bristol Bay salmon spawning streams, and blocked further oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Refuge. Last week, the administration upgraded conservation to equal footing with grazing, mining and energy development over 245 million acres of federal land, comprising one tenth of the nation.
The 46th President has come to sound like John Muir.
Witness his statement on the drilling ban: “From safeguarding sacred lands near the Grand Canyon to protecting Alaska treasures, my administration has conserved more than 41 million acres of land and water.” He described the National Petroleum Reserve as “among the most remarkable and healthy landscapes in the world, sustaining a vibrant subsistence economy for Alaska’s native communities.”
He’s also responding to nature’s warning signs.
The Arctic is warming at a faster pace than the rest of the planet. The consequences can be seen in “drunken forests,” trees leaning in various directions as the permafrost melts beneath them. Villages on the Bering and Chuchi Sea coastlines get hit with ferocious late fall and early winter storms, no longer getting the protection of an early forming ice pack. The retreat of the icepack in summer and fall threatens polar bears, which hunt seals off the ice. Interior Alaska has been hit by massive wildfires.
Still, Alaska’s native population is divided on oil drilling and the vetoed Ambler Access road. The Biden-Harris administration decision “does not reflect our communities’ wishes,” Nagruk Harcharek, president of the Voice of the Arctic Inupiac, said in a statement. It will “hurt the very residents the federal government purports to help by rolling back years of progress and impoverishing our communities and impoverish our Inupiac culture.”
The Ambler Access road project would have created 2,500 jobs during construction along with 300 permanent jobs once the mines were developed. It would also have supplied the United States with critical minerals for which this country currently depends on China.
Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, former mayor of the village of Nuiqsuit and longtime critic of North Slope energy development, has a different view. The administration decision will allow the land to “continue to sustain and pass along the traditions and activities of our elders for years and years to come,” she said in a statement.
APR24-Ambler-MapsDevelopment of Prudhoe Bay, in the early 1970s, involved a major tradeoff. It gave a go-ahead to the massive petroleum development, despite environmental risks that became reality in 1989 when the supertanker Exxon Valdez hit a reef while exiting Prince William Sound. The result was America’s worst oil spill (until the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico just over two decades later) and deep damage to the fisheries economy and such salmon-dependent towns as Cordova.
But the enabling legislation, narrowly passed by Congress, produced the one hundred and three-million-acre Alaska Lands Act. The nation gained four new national parks, including Wrangell-St. Elias, America’s largest national park. The Glacier Bay and Katmai National Monuments were upgraded to become national parks. More than 900,000 acres of Admiralty Island in Southeast Alaska became a national monument. Mount McKinley National Park, home to North America’s highest mountain (at 20,300 feet), tripled in size. It also acquired a new name – Denali National Park.
The Trump regime saw Alaska as a land to be drilled, logged, logged and developed. It offered up oil and gas leases in the Arctic Refuge just before Trump was forced to exit the Oval Office. It also vacated protections already in place. By contrast, the Biden-Harris administration has rolled back the rollbacks and rejoined the Paris climate accords.
