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"Our culture is not up for sale": The stakes of Trump’s push to drill in the Arctic refuge
A majority of voters don’t support drilling in the Arctic refuge. Trump is doing it anyway.
www.vox.com
12/10/20
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an expanse of public land in Alaska the size of South Carolina, is one of the last untouched landscapes in the world. The native Gwich’in people — who have lived in harmony with the area’s migratory Porcupine caribou herd for centuries — call the refuge’s vast coastal plain Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, or “The Sacred Place Where Life Begins.” But in the past few years, the fate of the refuge’s roughly 19.5 million acres has become rather bleak: Its permafrost is melting rapidly, along with the rest of the Arctic region. The refuge’s coastal plain also remains at risk to oil and gas development, which companies have long had their eye on but have been barred from doing — until now. Drilling in the US Arctic is what President Trump has longed to do, in hopes of making the US the No. 1 energy producer in the world. And in early December, the administration made a stunning, last-ditch announcement that it will auction off drilling rights in the refuge on January 6 — two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. It’s the administration’s final attempt to turn a profit on Indigenous lands with little regard for the environmental or cultural ramifications.
Trump’s window to sell drilling rights in the refuge is closing fast — and climate activists are not making it easy. In the past few years, they have successfully put pressure on corporations that typically finance the fossil fuel industry not to fund drilling in the Arctic. Last week, Bank of America became the latest major bank to join the growing list of financial institutions — including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs — that pledged not to fund any fossil fuel operations in the Arctic refuge, putting a roadblock in Big Oil’s finances to bid in the auction. Drilling in the Arctic isn’t what voters want, either. A new poll from the progressive think tank Data for Progress released this week shows that 53 percent of national voters oppose the administration’s proposal to rush approval of oil and gas leases in the Arctic, while 37 percent support the plan. “Trump isn’t even pretending to care what the public thinks about giving the Arctic refuge to Big Oil,” Kristen Monsell, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Vox. “Rushing through these leases is incredibly reckless and violates federal law. We’re counting on the Biden administration and the courts to protect polar bears and our climate where Trump wouldn’t.”
Trump is trying to sell off our Alaskan wildlife refuge heritage to Big Oil.
Thankfully, this scheme to help out his fossil-fuel donor friends is running into numerous problems including financing. Trump will grift anywhere and everywhere he can.