[ The expected approval of the massive Willow oil project would be
just the latest shift by Biden toward the political center before a
potential reelection bid.]
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BIDEN EXPECTED TO OK ALASKA OIL PROJECT  
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Ben Lefebvre and Zack Colman
March 11, 2023
Politico
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_ The expected approval of the massive Willow oil project would be
just the latest shift by Biden toward the political center before a
potential reelection bid. _

Climate activists hold a demonstration to urge President Biden to
reject the Willow Project at the U.S. Department of Interior on Nov.
17, 2022, in Washington, D.C. , Jemal Countess/Getty Images for
Sunrise AU

 

President Joe Biden’s allies in the climate movement are bracing for
their biggest setback from his administration as he moves closer to
approving an Alaskan oil project that would pump as much carbon into
the atmosphere as 60 coal-burning power plants.

The administration is expected to approve ConocoPhillips’ plans to
build its proposed Willow project on federal land in the Arctic
tundra, according to three people at environmental groups who have
talked to the White House and Interior Department in recent days about
it. But there is no indication yet that Biden himself has signed off
on it, and the administration appears to be still trying to decide how
big the project would be, these people said.

The White House insisted Friday and Saturday that the administration
has made “no final decisions” about the project. But
administration officials have touted the importance of oil production
in recent months, and people outside the administration said they had
been expecting the approval to be announced this past Friday.

Biden pledged to halt new oil and gas development on federal land
during his 2020 campaign, and he and Democrats in Congress passed
landmark climate legislation last summer aimed at weaning huge swaths
of the economy off of fossil fuels. But the surge in oil prices after
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the administration into an
awkward embrace of the oil industry, as Biden countered Republican
accusations that his policies were to blame for the skyrocketing price
at the gas pump that was stoking inflation.

Approving Willow would be just the latest shift by Biden toward the
political center as he moves toward a potential reelection bid. He
similarly dismayed liberals last week by saying he would not veto a
GOP-led repeal
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of changes to D.C.’s criminal code.

Environmental groups acknowledged Saturday that they were largely in
the dark about the White House’s plans, but said they believed that
the current discussions inside the administration were largely over
whether to limit the number of drilling sites at the Willow project to
two rather than three. Conoco had proposed building five well pads.

“It sounds like different groups in the White House are still
discussing” the potential size of the project, said one
environmental advocate who had been in contact with the administration
late Friday.

“They told us they had nothing to offer” on the state of project
deliberations, added the person, who was granted anonymity to describe
internal White House deliberations.

But if the reports of the approval are true, Biden’s shift to the
center on oil would threaten to demoralize the climate activists he
needs to support him in 2024, said Jamal Raad, co-founder and senior
adviser of the group Evergreen Action.

“It will be harder for us and climate activists to rally around this
president come next year,” Raad said, explaining the action would
detract from his many accomplishments, such as the $370 billion in
climate and clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act,
while putting the onus on Biden to issue tougher environmental rules
on cars and power plants.

Conoco declined to comment until it hears a decision directly from the
administration.

Conoco Chief Executive Ryan Lance last week urged the administration
to approve Willow, saying the project was in line with the Biden
administration’s recent exhortations to the industry to increase oil
production to help batten down prices.

“This is exactly what this administration has been asking our
industry to do over the last couple of years,” Lance told an energy
conference in Houston.

Regardless of the size, any plan would call for drilling oil and
building miles of pipelines and roads, a gravel pit, an air strip and
other infrastructure in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a
36,875-square-mile patch of federal land in the relatively undeveloped
Arctic wilderness. It would produce as much as 600,000 barrels of oil
over its three-decade lifetime.

The project would also add nearly 280 million tons of greenhouse gas
into the atmosphere over that period, according to the Interior
Department’s environmental analysis
[[link removed]].
That would be the equivalent of adding two new coal-fired power plants
to the U.S. electricity system every year, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency
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emissions calculator.

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, originally set aside by the
Harding administration for potential oil drilling in 1923, is outside
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, another swath of northern Alaska
that Biden has declared off-limits for oil development.

Environmentalists said they were still holding onto hope based on the
administration’s denial that it made a final decision to OK the
project, despite multiple news reports saying that an announcement of
the approval would be made in the coming days. (Bloomberg News first
reported Friday night
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that the administration had decided to greenlight it.)

“Great! Then there is still time to turn this all around!!!”
Natural Resources Defense Council spokesperson Anne Hawke posted on
Twitter [[link removed]]
after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied on Friday
that a final decision had been made.

Hawke also reached out to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg
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persuading Biden, tweeting at the young advocate: “In just days, the
US will approve a massive oil project in Alaska. Can you help us tell
US @POTUS to #StopWillowProject?”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a longtime climate advocate, expressed
dismay at the news.

“We cannot allow the Willow Project to move forward,” he tweeted
late Friday
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build a clean energy future — not return to a dark, fossil-fueled
past.”

An approval, if it comes, would infuriate environmental groups and
continue a year-long strengthening of the administration’s
relationship with the oil industry. But it would also come as market
analysts are forecasting that oil prices will remain volatile for the
next several years, which would make killing the project politically
tricky.

Biden himself has softened his rhetoric on transitioning the country
away from fossil fuels, and he has repeatedly pressed the oil and gas
industry to increase production in the short term to keep prices
lower.

“We are still going to need oil and gas for a while.”
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he said during his State of the Union speech last month.

The Willow development is the rare large-scale oil project to be
announced in recent years in the United States, where the industry has
instead shifted its focus to drilling smaller, cheaper and faster
projects using fracking to tap into shale fields in the Southwest. If
approved, construction could start soon, and additional construction
in Alaska’s North Slope for Willow will occur throughout the summer
and fall, the company has said.

Alaskan native tribes have expressed split opinions on the project,
with some warning it would degrade their environment and others
welcoming its potential economic gains.

“The Willow Project is a new opportunity to ensure a viable future
for our communities, creating generational economic stability for our
people and advancing our self-determination,” said Nagruk Harcharek,
president of the nonprofit Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, in a statement
Saturday. “North Slope Iñupiat communities have waited nearly a
generation for Willow to advance.”

Yet that urgency to develop the project, and the signals from the
White House, were disheartening to environmental groups.

“To us, it all sucks because it flies in the face of meeting our
climate goals. So we’re going to keep fighting until there is a
final record of decision,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice
president of government affairs with the League of Conservation
Voters.

Some of Biden’s green allies suggested the move could have
repercussions for Democrats in 2024. Along with the long-debated
Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, which Biden effectively killed in
one of his first acts as president, Willow has joined the ranks of
fossil fuel projects that in earlier decades would have flown under
radar but have now taken on outsized political significance.

The Biden administration is caught in the middle, hyping the Inflation
Reduction Act it signed into law as the biggest climate-related
legislation ever but also asking companies to keep pumping barrels to
keep fuel prices low in the here-and-now. That law has also won praise
from the oil and gas sector for its incentives for carbon capture and
storage and clean hydrogen – technologies the fossil fuel producers
are pursuing.

Raad, from Evergreen Action, said the Willow project “was something
that really took the internet and social media by storm the last few
weeks – because it is a physical thing and a physical place that
feels real.” And that has implications for Biden’s hopes for
reelection, he added.

“There’s just no escaping the fact that we’re going to need to
rally young folks and folks interested in climate next year to win,”
Raad said. “And this does not help in any shape or form.”

As of March 2, environmental advocates were citing
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9,000 videos protesting Willow on the social media platform TikTok.
Former Vice President Al Gore earlier this week weighed in to say it
would be “recklessly irresponsible”
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to approve Willow.

Deirdre Shelly, campaigns director with the youth environmental group
Sunrise Movement, said her organization is already strategizing for
the next election and that approving Willow would make organizers’
jobs more difficult.

“This is just a huge disappointment. … It does feel like an
about-face,” she said. “It makes it even harder for us to convince
young people that they need to vote, that the Democratic Party leaders
will act on climate.”

But the administration also felt heavy pressure from the oil industry
and the state’s politically powerful Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
Murkowski has long championed Willow as a needed boost to the Alaskan
economy, which has been troubled for years as the overall oil industry
has picked up stakes to move to the cheaper opportunities in the Lower
48.

Oil and gas companies and energy-state lawmakers would have been ready
to blame the rejection of Willow for any subsequent rise in energy
costs, even though the Biden Interior Department has approved new
permits to drill on public land at a faster rate than his predecessors
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Murkowski, speaking Friday in Houston before the announcement, said
she had met with the White House last week to warn that the
administration was legally bound to approve the project, given that
Conoco held oil leases on federal land.

“The fact of the matter is these are valid existing leases that
Conoco holds,” Murkowski told reporters. “If the administration
[had] basically not allowed them to be able to access those leases,
what follows then? … Alaska litigation is always something that we
have to reckon with.”

_Catherine Morehouse contributed to this report._

 

* Climate Change
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* Joe Biden
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* Oil
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