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The Trump administration’s Arctic Refuge oil lease auction was a total bust
Photo by Shelley Wales/iStock
On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 6 as many Americans were transfixed by the violent insurrectionists laying siege to the US Capitol the Department of the Interior was undertaking what some conservationists have likened to another kind of plunder: the first-ever oil and gas lease sale in one of North America’s most iconic wilderness landscapes.
For more than 40 years, environmentalists and Republicans in Congress have battled over the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain, a 1.6-million-acre stretch of fragile tundra at the edge of the Arctic Sea. In 2017, with a two-page provision tucked into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Donald Trump achieved what no other Republican president had been able to: opening up the refuge to oil and gas exploration and development. The lease sale was, in a way, the culmination of one of the defining environmental s
The agency refused to tell the public the nature of the confidential matter.
Had the agency wanted to fill in the public about its secret plans, the meeting announcement would have mentioned the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it didnât.
AIDEA now wants Alaskans to believe that it was not trying to hide its plan to spend up to $20 million bidding on federal oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the end of the month.
Alan Weitzner, executive director of AIDEA, tells the Anchorage Daily News that the resolution approved by the AIDEA board Wednesday to spend $20 million on ANWR leases wasnât written when the meeting was announced.