In Tuesday’s Interior Department order, Secretary Deb Haaland said that a review of the Trump administration’s leasing program in the wildlife refuge found “multiple legal deficiencies” including “insufficient analysis” required by environmental laws and a failure to assess other alternatives. Haaland’s order calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to those leases in order to conduct “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.”
The step, coming just days after the Justice Department defended another drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, underscores the balancing act the new administration aims to strike as it slows fossil fuel development on public lands. While Biden has paused new federal oil and gas leasing and pledged to drastically cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, he has taken a much more cautious approach toward most oil and gas operations approved under his predecessor.
On Wednesday, Justice Department attorneys filed a brief defending ConocoPhillips’s Willow project, an oil reservoir on the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that could hold up to 300 million barrels of oil. The administration also has defended the Trump administration’s decision to issue oil and gas leases in Wyoming and declined to press for the shutdown of the Dakota Access pipeline, a project Haaland protested while serving in Congress.
But Tuesday’s move signaled that the new administration was willing to take aggressive action in an area that has been a rallying cry for environmentalists for decades.
The Jan. 6 sale of 11 tracts in the refuge on just over 550,000 acres netted roughly $14 million, a tiny fraction of what Republicans initially predicted it would yield. Only two of the bids were competitive, so nearly all of the drilling rights on the land sold for the minimum price of $25 an acre.
Many major banks in the U.S. and Canada, under pressure from Indigenous and environmental activists, announced that they would not finance any projects on the refuge. Low oil prices, coupled with the prospect of a public backlash, meant that no major oil companies bid on the leases.
As a result, a state agency, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, emerged as the main bidder. The agency put up all but two of the winning bids, which went to a couple of small energy firms.
In an interview Tuesday, former interior secretary David Bernhardt said that the Biden administration “has been stunningly bold in seeking delays in litigation” but that it has not departed from the Trump administration in every instance. In the Willow case, he noted, the Justice Department was already on record opposing a preliminary injunction to halt drilling, and the department had spent roughly $6 million conducting an environmental analysis of the project.
“All of that is a big influence on the subsequent administration’s determination of position, and sometimes they’re more constrained than in other times,” he said.
But Earthjustice managing attorney Eric Jorgensen, who is challenging the Willow decision along with lawyers from several other environmental groups, questioned why the Biden administration would defend Trump officials’ climate analysis in court.
“Thirty years of climate pollution from this oil project will accelerate the global climate crisis, and it is at odds with the Biden administration’s bold climate leadership," he said, adding that he hoped Interior officials would revisit the decision. “In the end, on these choices there is ultimately a climate imperative to take prompt action. And even in the face of strong political pressure, taking those choices in the near term is what the administration needs to do to meet the bold climate vision that it set out.”
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Biden administration suspends oil and gas leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - The Washington Post
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