The Biden administration’s decision to authorize a massive Alaska oil drilling project has sparked furious backlash from U.S. environmental groups, which say it flies in the face of the president’s campaign trail promises and betrays his climate commitments.
The Interior Department approved a scaled-down version of ConocoPhillips's Willow Project in northern Alaska, allowing the Houston-based company to develop three out of five drilling well pads it had initially proposed. Interior also “indefinitely” banned oil and gas leasing on more than 2 million acres nearby in a nod to conservationists.
Still, opponents are unmoved. In a joint statement Monday, two dozen of the nation’s most influential environmental groups blasted Willow, which would be the largest single fossil fuel development project on federal lands, as a “giant step backwards” in addressing the climate crisis.
The decision “again demonstrates how political and industry interests put ‘business as usual’ before the health of people and the planet,” the groups said.
Biden campaigned on the promise to halt all oil and gas leasing on federal lands. Some groups said that the Willow Project, which could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day, risks jeopardizing Biden’s pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“This decision to approve the Willow project makes a stretch goal even more difficult to meet,” Margie Alt, director of the advocacy coalition Climate Action Campaign, said in a statement.
Approving Willow “will lock in decades of dirty and dangerous oil and gas production and drown out the tremendous environmental and economic opportunities available from transitioning to a clean economy,” she added.
"BLM cannot dismiss the significance of these emissions on the basis that they are a small fraction of global emissions, which is true for any single project, because it ignores the global nature of the problem posed by climate change," Earthjustice, an environmental nongovernmental organization, said in comments to the Bureau of Land Management's draft environmental review of the project.
INTERIOR APPROVES GIANT ALASKA OIL PROJECT AGAINST ENVIRONMENTAL OBJECTIONS
And some cited the strong opposition of certain native Alaskan communities, including Nuiqsut, a majority-native village in the North Slope Bureau the residents of which rely on subsistence hunting of caribou. Leaders in Nuiqsut fear the development of Willow could harm the caribous' migration pattern and deter them from the area. In its draft environmental impact statement for the project, Interior determined that oil and gas development has encroached onto “highly used Nuiqsut subsistence use areas” since 2000.
“This decision flies in the face of concerns raised by community leaders in Nuiqsut about how this development will threaten their subsistence way of life and worsen their existing air quality crisis; and it will undermine progress towards our climate targets, all for the sake of padding ConocoPhillips' bottom line,” Lena Moffitt, the executive director of the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, said in a statement.
The Willow Project is an instance of larger issues pitting liberal Democrats against more centrist members of the party. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat from Alaska, has endorsed the project as a source of revenue and job opportunity for the area. Alaska's congressional delegation as a whole has strongly supported the project.
Still, since taking office, Biden has struggled to balance his party's competing interests on climate change and the environment versus issues of energy security and near-term fossil fuel demand. These issues have taken on heightened significance as Russia’s war in Ukraine stretches into its second year.
And with environmental groups vowing to challenge the Willow decision in court, these tensions are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.
“We will consider every appropriate tool in our continuing fight to stop the Willow climate bomb,” Christy Goldfuss, the chief policy impact officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement Monday.
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“This decision is bad for the climate, bad for the environment and bad for the Native Alaska communities who oppose this and feel their voices were not heard,” Goldfuss added.