House Democrats are seeking to exploit the reconciliation process with a $3.5 trillion dollar package in pursuit of high priority progressive programs. That wish list includes a litany of items on the left-wing green agenda, with protections against Arctic oil exploration at the top.
Tucked into the massive legislation last week by the House Natural Resources Committee are restored protections to bar drilling within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s (ANWR) 1002 Area, a nearly 1.6 million-acre patch along Alaska’s northern coast opened for oil and gas extraction in 2017.
“There isn’t a more clear example of congressional confusion than the current move by ‘wildlife-above-human-life’ extremists to ban oil and gas drilling in ANWR’s Coastal Plain,” said Rick Whitbeck, the Alaska state director for the energy nonprofit Power the Future. “They forget that Congress authorized and encouraged development in that exact area previously, and that banning future development puts the local indigenous people in peril of having to out-migrate from their village to find jobs to sustain their families.”
If passed, the package would likely seal the fate of drilling prospects in ANWR until Republicans reclaim both chambers of Congress and the White House to reverse course. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has continued to pull every lever to keep operations offline, from suspending oil and gas leases on federal lands to ordering new environmental reviews reassessing proposed projects.
The 1.6 million-acre stretch opened for exploration in 2017 amounts to less than 10 percent of the total refuge (which is roughly the size of South Carolina) off limits to development in northeast Alaska. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, somewhere between 4.3 and 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil remain underneath the surface of the 1002 Area, which would make it one of the most productive oil fields in the country as gas prices reach seven-year highs.
The only tribe living within the proposed boundary for drilling, the Iñupiat, have lobbied Congress for decades to allow development projects to move forward. Radical environmentalists seeking to preserve the entire state — which constitutes nearly a fifth of the entire nation’s landmass — as an untouched museum they’d maybe like to visit one day, however, have successfully exploited the opposition of a rival tribe hundreds of miles south of the 1002 Area to cloak opposition under the moral righteousness of environmental justice.