Trump Opens Arctic National Wildlife Refuge To Oil Drilling, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That America's Largest Untouched Wilderness Remained Untouched

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Bringing to a close one of the longest-running frustrations in modern Republican politics, the Interior Department announced Monday that it had finalized a plan to open the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing, resolving a decades-old concern that the largest tract of untouched wilderness in the United States had remained largely untouched.

The decision clears roughly 1.5 million acres of northern Alaskan tundra, long protected from development, for future drilling. The coastal plain serves as the calving ground for the Porcupine caribou herd, as denning habitat for polar bears, and as sacred land for the Gwich'in people, none of whom had submitted a competing bid. Officials noted that a requirement to hold lease sales in the refuge had been quietly inserted into the 2017 tax law, allowing the administration to present the opening of a wildlife sanctuary as a matter of fiscal responsibility.

"Reagan couldn't do it. Nobody could do it. I got it done," said the President, who has repeatedly cited the refuge as proof of an ability to accomplish what every prior administration had declined to attempt. Aides confirmed that the President's interest in the refuge dated to a conversation with an acquaintance in the oil business.

"The environmental review is complete and the science has been considered," said one official within the administration, declining to specify which science or in what direction. "The caribou will adapt. They are very adaptable animals, we are told, and if they are not, that is a separate matter for a separate agency."

The plan imposed no obligation on any company to actually drill, requiring only that the government make the land available, a distinction the administration characterized as delivering energy independence and that opponents characterized as delivering a press release.

At press time, the administration had scheduled the refuge's first-ever lease sale for the final days of the term, where it would draw meaningful interest from little more than a state-owned Alaskan development agency, the nation's largest banks having already announced they would not finance drilling there.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who secured a political trophy that had eluded every president since Jimmy Carter and could now cite the refuge at rallies as evidence of getting done what Ronald Reagan could not.
§Senator Lisa Murkowski and the Alaska congressional delegation, who had spent years seeking to open the refuge and who authored the 2017 tax-law provision that mandated the lease sales.
§The oil and gas industry, granted access to an estimated multibillion-barrel reserve that had been off-limits for roughly four decades.
§The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, the state-owned entity positioned to acquire leases that private drillers and their banks were increasingly unwilling to touch.
§Fossil fuel donors and industry trade groups, who had lobbied for refuge access across multiple administrations and finally received it.

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