The Biden administration announced new environmental protections covering more than a million acres in Alaska in a last-minute effort to protect the affected areas from President-elect Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” energy agenda.
The Department of the Interior (DOI) announced the move on Thursday, attempting to protect 1.3 million acres and their “vital subsistence resources” in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A). The action would require the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to formally explain the impacts that potential drilling activity could have on hunting and fishing in the covered acreage.
“Throughout our efforts to receive feedback from the public, we heard significant input about the need for protecting subsistence by identifying it as a significant resource value in the NPR-A,” Acting Deputy Secretary of the Interior Laura Daniel-Davis said in a statement. “Fish and wildlife have provided food for Alaska Native people in this region for millennia and, based on the information we received and our legal mandate, we have concluded it is necessary to commence a process to ensure its protection.”
Former President Warren G. Harding established the NPR-A in 1923, and it initially served as an emergency fuel reserve for the U.S. Navy. The NPR-A is now approximately 23 million acres in size, and the Biden administration already moved in April 2024 to ban drilling across 13 million of those acres.
The protections unveiled Thursday could complicate Trump’s plans to unleash oil and gas production across America’s federal lands and waters by introducing a new legal hurdle, according to The New York Times. However, the new policy “probably” will not be able to stop the Trump administration altogether, the Times reported.
Environmental groups applauded the last-minute move from the Biden administration, though Republican Alaska Rep. Nick Begich and Nagruk Harcharek, president of the Voice of Arctic Iñupiat (VOICE), both slammed the policy.
“This is no way to create durable policy on Alaska’s North Slope. Today’s development exemplifies the Biden administration’s broken policy process, prioritizing short-term political wins over lasting solutions for the communities directly impacted by its actions,” Harcharek said Thursday. “It is deeply insulting that our lands, communities, and culture continue to be treated as the outgoing Biden administration’s pet legacy project – especially after voters in our region and around the country resoundingly rejected the federal government’s policy agenda.”
“The North Slope Iñupiat will continue to fight the Biden administration’s attempts to deny our self-determination in our ancestral homelands,” Harcharek continued. “We look forward to building a more collaborative relationship, characterized by mutual respect, with the Trump-Vance administration following its inauguration next week.”
DOI did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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