Oil prices are rock bottom in a glutted market, but Donald Trump’s interior secretary, David Bernhardt, is planning to approve drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), getting leases locked in while Trump is still in office so that Democrats wouldn’t be able to roll back the move. In 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress opened the door to drilling ANWR in its tax law, and Trump is not wasting time.
This is an unpopular move that risks serious environmental damage and it’s being done at a time when oil companies are making spending cuts because of a supply glut and crashing prices. But this move makes total sense if Trump’s goal is to do as much damage as he can while still in office. Which it most certainly is.
How much is this about Republican posturing rather than the market? “Goldman Sachs Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. are among several banks to rule out funding for ANWR drilling specifically and more have broadly ruled out financing for Arctic development,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “BP PLC, a pioneer of Alaska oil, decided last year to sell all of its assets in the state even with an ANWR auction pending—only to see the deal temporarily delayed this spring while falling oil prices caused major banks to balk at financing the buyer, Hilcorp Energy Co.”
Even if ANWR drilling would be the most profitable move in history, though, it would be a bad one. The Interior Department’s own environmental impact statement admits drilling could lead to extinctions—and that was despite the environmental impact statement being a typical Trump cover-up of the real dangers of drilling in ANWR. The document “is inadequate, incomplete, lacks citation and scientific basis to support its conclusions, fails to grapple with the relevant information, and does not connect the dots between the wildlife and the impacts from the planned development,” according to the policy director at Audubon Alaska.
Drilling is also opposed by the Indigenous Gwich'in people who depend on the caribou that would also be under threat from the plan.
None of this matters to Team Trump, though—or, if it matters, it’s all added incentive to do as much damage as possible in the (hopefully very limited) time they have left.