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Trump's White House Continues Effort to Renew Drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
In April 2017, Trump signed an Executive Order aimed at ending the ban on offshore drilling in certain areas. Smart Dissent painfully covered that here. In late June, Trump spoke again on the topic, claiming that progress is being made to make his "vision" a reality and sell our environment to the highest bidder.
The White House is making a bid to overturn the Obama administration’s five-year plan forbidding oil and gas exploration in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and will examine opportunities to drill almost anywhere off the U.S. coast.
Unfortunately, Trump was correct in June -- (destructive) progress is being made.
Trump administration is quietly moving to allow energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the first time in more than 30 years... with a draft rule that would lay the groundwork for drilling.
Congress has sole authority to determine whether oil and gas drilling can take place within the refuge’s 19.6 million acres. But seismic studies represent a necessary first step, and Interior Department officials are modifying a 1980s regulation to permit them.
In an Aug. 11 memo, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acting director James W. Kurth instructed the agency’s Alaska regional director to update a rule that allowed exploratory drilling between Oct. 1, 1984, and May 31, 1986, by striking those calendar constraints.
Seriously..... “When finalized, the new regulation will allow for applicants to [submit] requests for approval of new exploration plans,” Kurth wrote.
What are some of the reasons we have banned drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?
- The remote and vast habitat... serves as the main calving ground for one of North America’s last large caribou herds and a stop for migrating birds from six continents....
- [Seismic studies], which sends shock waves underground...would disturb denning polar bears, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, as well as musk oxen and other Arctic animals.
- An increasing number of polar bears are now denning onshore during the winter — when seismic studies would take place — due to diminishing sea ice, and a significant portion of the coastal plain is designated as critical habitat for the bears.
“The administration is very stealthily trying to move forward with drilling on the Arctic’s coastal plain,” said Defenders of Wildlife President Jamie Rappaport Clark, who led the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Bill Clinton. “This is a complete about-face from decades of practice.” Environmental groups would be likely to challenge any decision to conduct seismic work in the refuge in federal court.