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The Trump administration on Thursday finalized plans to open Alaska’s most sensitive lands to industrial development, approving oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a controversial road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the decision to open all 1.56 million acres of ANWR’s coastal plain, reversing protections that had been put in place under the Biden administration. In January, a congressionally-mandated lease sale in the refuge failed to draw any bids.
The area is the calving ground for the Porcupine Caribou Herd, the foundation of the Gwich’in people's food security and culture. “Opening the coastal plain is a direct threat to our people, our culture and our future,” said Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee. “A leasing program that would open the entire Coastal Plain completely ignores the impacts that oil and gas development would have on the land, on wildlife, and on our communities.”
In a related move, the Trump administration announced it had advanced a land swap to build a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, one of the state's last intact costal wildlands. The refuge’s eelgrass beds feed hundreds of thousands of migratory birds.
“I worry every day about what’s going to happen to the brant and emperor geese if there’s a road in Izembek,” Chief Edgar Tall Sr. of the Native Village of Hooper Bay said. “We need the brant and emperor geese because they’re nutritious and fatty from feeding in Izembek. … If the birds disappear because of the Izembek road, our community could disappear too.”
Oil, electric, sugar money paying for East Wing destruction
Oil billionaire Harold Hamm and Florida utility company NextEra energy are among the donors paying for President Trump's destruction of the White House's East Wing. Hamm is a longtime benefactor of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, while Burgum's deputy secretary Kate MacGregor is a former NextEra executive. Other donors to the president's ballroom project include Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, whose family owns Florida Crystals, a sugar company that has long been linked to pollution in the Everglades.
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It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”
