Last Wednesday, drilling rights to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were opened for sale, capping Republicans’ decades-long quest to drill in one of the nation’s largest undeveloped, wild places.
The coastal plain between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea is an expansive tundra ecosystem that hosts millions of migratory birds from six continents. It's where Porcupine caribou migrate each spring to birth calves. Polar bears den in the snow and ice along the coast and river edges, while muskoxen, wolves and other wildlife roam the rolling plain. These protected species and many other sensitive resources that the native people of the Arctic, the Gwich’in, depend on are now at risk.
The Bureau of Land Management rushing through these drilling sales as a final handout to the oil and gas industry is outrageous but not surprising, as it has constantly denied the realities of climate change under the Trump administration.
No matter what, we are determined to fight back to protect public lands from drilling and fracking!
Already, with lackluster oil prices and an increasing number of banks saying they will not finance Arctic energy projects, major oil companies did not even try to buy the leases, leaving a state agency as the main bidder.
President-elect Biden can overturn this decision and we are ready to pressure him to do what is right: protecting this vast tract of vital tundra ecosystem, the Native Gwich’in communities and the wildlife they depend upon from destructive fracking! This is a step he can, and must, take when he becomes president. Will you join our fight?
Public lands such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should remain OFF LIMITS to Big Oil & Gas and fracking. Why? Because fracking takes us further away from solving our climate crisis!
Food & Water Watch has been working for years to ban fracking on federal lands. We had the first bill to ban fracking introduced in 2015, and working with partners we've collected more than 600,000 comments against public fracking plans. We can defeat Big Oil & Gas.
Wenonah Hauter
Founder and Executive Director
Food & Water Watch and Food & Water Action
Food & Water Watch and its affiliated organization, Food & Water Action, are advocacy groups with a common mission to protect our food, water and climate. This email was sent to [email protected] - and we're glad you got it, because it's one of the most important ways you can reclaim political power, hold elected officials accountable and resist corporate control.
