America’s last great wilderness, is one step closer to being the site of America’s newest oil field.
The Trump administration is moving toward oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, fulfilling a longtime Republican priority that most Democrats fiercely oppose.
A notice being published Friday in the Federal Register starts a 60-day review to sell oil and gas leases in the remote refuge, one of the most pristine areas in the United States and home to polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other species.
This region of Alaska’s North Slope has been protected for almost 60 years. It’s one of the few relatively undisturbed regions in a world where even “wilderness” often includes roads, pipelines, power lines, buildings and frequent human presence that disrupt habitats. The pretense that the refuge represents an enormous area, and that drilling will only be allowed in a small part makes little difference, as access will disrupt a much greater region, and in conditions as difficult as those of the Arctic, animals must range over large areas just to survive. There’s a reason why such a large refuge was set aside, and a reason why any development in the area threatens to be a disaster.
Trump views the destruction of America’s greatest wildlife refuge as one of his signature triumphs.
Addressing fellow Republicans at a GOP conference in West Virginia in February, Trump said a friend told him that every Republican president since Ronald Reagan wanted to get oil drilling approved in the refuge.
“I really didn’t care about it, and then when I heard that everybody wanted it — for 40 years, they’ve been trying to get it approved, and I said, ‘Make sure you don’t lose ANWR,’” Trump said.
He didn’t even want it … but the idea that he could do something that had evaded others, even something horrible, was irresistible to Trump.
When it comes to “just a tiny area,” the Ryan Zinke lead Interior Department is actually planning to sell off two blocks, totaling over 800,000 acres. How big is that? It’s over 1,200 square miles. It’s an area bigger than the state of Rhode Island. All of it carved out of one wildlife refuge.
And the rules will give oil companies the rights to clear area, build roads, and create facilities to support their drilling and store oil and gas that can run outside the permitted areas.
Trump is right. What he’s doing in Northern Alaska, is one of the defining demonstrations of an anti-environment, thoughtless, egocentric policy that has no other concerns than showing that Trump can run roughshod over what’s best for the nation or the planet.
And just how did Trump manage to get through a bill that in previous years had been fought back with massive support from the American people? The answer is, he didn’t. He was just the guy who signed the trick pulled on the country by the Republican Party.
Opponents of drilling in the coastal plain point to the very vehicle in which Congress is trying to open it up — through the special budget reconciliation process that requires just 51 votes in the Senate — as evidence that through traditional channels they still do not have the political will to drill in the Arctic refuge. They say revenue estimates are vastly overblown, drilling is too big of an ecological risk and the greenhouse gas emissions would hurt Alaska — which is warming at a rate 2.5 times the global average.