By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Biden administration suspended oil and gas drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska on Tuesday, reversing another pro-big business, anti-environment move by former President Donald Trump and delivering on a promise by presidential candidate Joe Biden to protect the amazing and critical ecosystem from damaging fossil fuel extraction.

The decision sets up a legal process to permanently ban drilling in one of the largest tracts of untouched wilderness in the United States, home to threatened caribou, endangered polar bears and migrating waterfowl.

The policy move came in a formal order from Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, which suspends all action on leases by oil and gas companies until the agency has completed a comprehensive legal and environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and a review of the Trump administration’s decision to open up the area that had been protected for four decades to drilling in the first place.

While the move follows President Biden’s Inauguration Day executive order to halt new Arctic drilling, it also serves as a high-profile way for the president to solidify his environmental credentials after coming under fire from activists recently angered by his recent support for some fossil fuel projects in other parts of Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming.

“President Biden believes America’s national treasures are cultural and economic cornerstones of our country and he is grateful for the prompt action by the Department of the Interior to suspend all leasing pending a review of decisions made in the last administration’s final days that could have changed the character of this special place forever,” Gina McCarthy, White House domestic climate policy adviser, said in a statement.

Secretarial Order 3401 directs the department to initiate a comprehensive environmental analysis to review the potential impacts of the drilling program and to address legal deficiencies in the current environmental review, and serves to notify companies vying for lessees under the Trump plan that the leases could be reaffirmed, voided or subject to additional mitigation measures.

Under the previous administration, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) established and began administering an oil and gas program in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge. After the BLM prepared the “Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program Environmental Impact Statement,” that agency held a lease sale on January 6, 2021 — the same day as the Capitol insurrection — and subsequently issued 10-year leases on nine tracts covering more than 430,000 acres.

“Suspending leases in the Arctic Refuge is a major step forward in keeping President Biden’s campaign promise and cutting carbon pollution,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters. “Going forward, we also need to ensure the administration keeps its climate commitment across the board. A ‘drill here, don’t drill there’ approach will not get the job done.”

Some elected officials in Alaska were not pleased, however, according to reporting by the New York Times.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, called the move an “assault on Alaska’s economy” and pledged to “use every means necessary to undo this egregious federal overreach.”

“Alaska does responsible oil and gas development in the Arctic under stricter environmental standards than anywhere else in the world,” Governor Dunleavy said. “Yet the federal government is focused on trying to stop our ability to produce oil and gas. Each action they take demonstrates a failure to comprehend the worldwide demand for oil and gas.”

The world’s leading energy agency warned in May that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to prevent the pollution they produce from driving average global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.

Experts observed that the timing of the announcement to suspend the drilling leases in the refuge, coming on the heels of the fossil-fuel friendly actions by the administration, could be designed to appease Biden’s environmental critics.

“This will help solidify the president’s bona fides in opposing major new fossil fuel projects,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School. “He doesn’t have a 100 percent clean record on this. This is certainly a step that the environmental community will smile on, coming at this moment, in view of the recent actions that environmentalists didn’t like.”

Still, the suspension of the leases alone does not guarantee that drilling will be blocked for all time in the Arctic refuge. The administration has only committed to reviewing the Trump leases, not canceling them. Yet it does lay the legal groundwork for a permanent ban, if it determines that the leases were granted illegally.

“I wouldn’t say that it halts it but it slows it down considerably,” Gerrard said. “People knew that it was vulnerable and that they couldn’t count on the Trump leases sticking. At a minimum it’s a blinking yellow light for potential developers and investors.”

Environmental groups applauded the move but called for a permanent ban on Arctic drilling.

“Until the leases are canceled, they will remain a threat to one of the wildest places left in America,” said Kristen Miller, acting director of the Alaska Wilderness League. “Now we look to the administration and Congress to prioritize legislatively repealing the oil leasing mandate and restore protections to the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain.”

The refuge, 19 million acres in the northeastern part of the state, had long been off limits to oil and gas development, with Democrats, environmentalists and some Alaska Native groups successfully fighting efforts to open it.

But Trump made opening a portion of it, about 1.5 million acres along Prudhoe Bay that is known as the Coastal Plain, a centerpiece of his push to develop more domestic fossil fuel production.

In 2017, the Congress included language in a tax bill establishing a leasing program as a way of generating revenue for the federal government. But an environmental review, required under federal law, was only completed last year.

Environmental groups and others immediately sued the Trump administration, saying the review was faulty. For one thing, they said, the analysis discounted the impact of oil and gas production on climate change, something that Biden put at the center of his policies from Day One.

While the issue remained in the courts, the Trump administration went ahead with a lease sale in early January, just weeks before Trump left office.

There had been little interest in the leases, however, at least publicly, from major oil companies, given the high cost of producing oil in the Arctic, the growing desire to reduce fossil fuel use, and the risks of drilling in such a pristine area. After pressure from environmental organizations and Native groups, major banks had pledged not to finance any drilling efforts in the refuge.

The apparent lack of interest was borne out in the sale. Only two small companies made bids to acquire 10-year rights to explore and drill for oil on two tracts totaling about 75,000 acres.

A state-owned economic development corporation in Alaska, offering the minimum of $25 an acre, was the sole bidder on the other tracts, totaling about half a million acres. That raised legal issues that have not been resolved, including whether the state had standing to purchase leases.

Kristen Miller, leading one of the groups that sued the Trump administration, said the leasing program and resulting sale were the result of a “flawed and legally deficient process.”

Two weeks ago, Haaland called senior Senator Lisa Murkowski and the rest of Alaska’s congressional delegation to inform them she would approve of a multibillion dollar ConocoPhillips oil drilling project in the National Petroleum Reserve. The project, which Haaland opposed when she served in Congress, is expected to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day for 30 years, locking in decades of new fossil fuel development.

The Biden administration also last month opposed in court shutting down the bitterly-contested Dakota Access pipeline, which is carrying about 550,000 barrels of oil daily from North Dakota to Illinois. It also could have decided to halt the pipeline while the Army Corps of Engineers conducts a new court-ordered environmental review, but it opted not to intervene.

The Biden administration also defended 440 oil and gas leases issued by the Trump administration on federal land in Wyoming that is also critical habitat for the sage grouse, mule deer and pronghorn.

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Author Glynn Wilson wrote about the need to protect the ANWR 30 years ago.