[Biden may have promised ‘no more drilling on federal lands,
period’ during his campaign, but the reality has been very
different]
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BIDEN’S APPROVAL OF THE WILLOW PROJECT SHOWS INCONSISTENCY  
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Oliver Milman
March 14, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Biden may have promised ‘no more drilling on federal lands,
period’ during his campaign, but the reality has been very different
_

Protesters gather near the White House on 3 March demanding that
Biden stop the Willow oil drilling project., Bryan Olin
Dozier/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

 

Joe Biden continues to confound on the climate crisis. Hailed as
America’s first “climate president”, Biden signed sweeping,
landmark legislation to tackle global heating last year and has warned
that rising temperatures are an “existential threat to humanity”.
And yet, on Monday, his administration decided to approve one of the
largest oil drilling projects staged in the US in decades.

The green light given to the Willow development
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on the remote tundra of Alaska’s northern Arctic coast, swatting
aside the protests of millions of online petitioners, progressives in
Congress and even Al Gore
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will have global reverberations.

There are more than 600m barrels of oil available to be dislodged by
ConocoPhillips over the next 30 years, effectively adding the
emissions of the entire country of Belgium
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further heat the atmosphere.

The scale of Willow is vast, with more than 200 oilwells, several new
pipelines, a central processing plant, an airport and a gravel mine
set to enable the extraction of oil long beyond the time
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scientists say that wealthy countries should have kicked the habit, in
order to avoid disastrous global heating.

Biden’s approval of this is “a colossal and reprehensible stain on
his environmental legacy”, according to Raena Garcia, fossil fuels
campaigner at Friends of the Earth. Even a group of Biden’s
Democratic allies, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, attacked the
decision as ignoring “the voices of the people of Nuiqsut, our
frontline communities, and the irrefutable science that says we must
stop building projects like this to slow the ever more devastating
impacts of climate change”.

But the approval of the project is consistent with an administration
that has approved nearly 100 more oil and gas drilling leases than
Donald Trump had at the same point in his presidency, federal data
shows. Biden may have promised “no more drilling on federal lands,
period” during his presidential campaign, but the reality has been
very different – not only have the hydrocarbons continued to flow,
they are in a sort of boom, with both oil and gas production forecast
to hit record levels year.

The White House can point out it is in the middle of a set of
confusing, and often contradictory, set of circumstances. Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine roiled global energy markets and triggered a push
to build new export terminals to ship US oil and gas to European
allies, even as Biden toiled to pass $370bn in clean energy spending
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in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Younger, progressive voters have urged the administration to do more
on climate – the youth-led Sunrise movement
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said the Willow decision “abandons millions of young people” ahead
of the 2024 election – even as Republicans have continued to hammer
Biden for waging a supposed “war” on domestic energy and blamed
him for rising gasoline prices.

A series of court challenges, and a closely divided Congress, have
also forced Biden’s hand. All members of Alaska’s congressional
delegation, including newly elected Democrat Mary Peltola
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called for Willow to be approved, citing thousands of new jobs. “We
all recognize the need for cleaner energy, but there is a major gap
between our capability to generate it and our daily needs,” Peltola
wrote in an op-ed
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on Friday with Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, the Republican
senators from Alaska.

Biden himself appears to share this view – in his recent State of
the Union speech, the president said “we’re going to need oil for
at least another decade”, before adding “and beyond that”, after
boos from some lawmakers. This sort of “rhetorical dualism [is] a
call for ‘one last fossil bender before America goes green and
sober’”, according to a note by analysts at ClearView Energy
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Administration officials have stressed that the allowable Willow
project
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is smaller than ConocoPhillips hoped, with three drilling sites
allowed instead of the five proposed, and have signaled that the
company would have probably prevailed in a court challenge if the
project was rejected, given it has held leases in the region for more
than 20 years.
The Department of the Interior has also unveiled proposed rules it has
framed as a “firewall” against further drilling, with all of the
US’s Arctic Ocean off-limits to future oil and gas exploration, as
well as the blocking of leases on more than half of the 23m acre
National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska
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Slope that contains wildlife considered imperative for the subsistence
of local native communities.

This conservation action, appropriately announced in a
whiplash-inducing way the day before the Willow decision was made
public, shows that Biden “continues to deliver on the most
aggressive climate agenda in American history”, the interior
department claimed.

“Let’s be clear – this project, which the interior department
has substantially reduced in size under considerable legal
constraints, won’t stop us from achieving the ambitious clean energy
goals president Biden has set,” an administration official said on
Monday.

But critics point out that the brutal reality of Earth’s climate
system doesn’t recognize political expediency or future good
intentions. The International Energy Agency, among others, has warned
that no new oil and gas fields can be developed
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if the world is to avoid breaching temperature thresholds that
scientists say will tip the planet into increasingly dangerous
heatwaves, flooding, wildfires and other impacts.

For all of the new wind and solar projects
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spurred by last year’s climate bill, and Biden’s enthusiastic
promotion [[link removed]] of electric
vehicles, Willow is a sobering reality check – the project will wipe
out
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the emissions cuts provided by all renewable energy developments over
the next decade, adding the equivalent of 2m new gas-guzzling cars to
the roads.

“We don’t need to prop up the fossil fuel industry with new,
multi-year projects that are a recipe for climate chaos,” as Gore
told the Guardian on Friday
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“Instead, we must end the expansion of oil, gas and coal and embrace
the abundant climate solutions at our fingertips.”

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* Willow Oil Project; President Biden; Alaska; Climate Crisis
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