Trump Administration Advances Plan to Sell Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Big Oil

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has issued a draft plan to lease the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil and gas industry. The agency’s environmentally destructive, legally inadequate plan would sell off one of America’s last great wildlands to the highest bidder. The proposal fails to fully analyze the long-term impacts of converting wildlife habitat into an industrial oil field or the contribution of leasing and development to global climate change. The Trump administration’s scheme also declines to identify which of four proposed alternatives it has chosen for leasing the coastal plain, further obfuscating this rushed public planning process.

The refuge leasing plan is the administration’s latest move in a series of reckless actions to accelerate drilling both onshore and offshore in the Arctic, including an environmental assessment (EA) for a proposal from the oil services company, SAExploration Inc., to conduct seismic testing across the entire coastal plain beginning this winter.

Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, issued this statement:

“The administration’s Arctic Refuge leasing plan ignores science, turns a deaf ear to public opinion, attempts to skirt the law and paper over a disastrous decision that has already been made.

“Driven by its energy dominance agenda, the Trump administration is intent on selling off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Big Oil, regardless of the cost to imperiled polar bears, the Porcupine caribou herd, hundreds of migratory birds and the Gwich’in people, who have depended on the coastal plain for millennia.

“We will see this administration in court soon for its reckless efforts to turn this iconic landscape into an industrial oilfield.”