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