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(CNN) — The Secretary of the Interior of U.SDavid Bernhardt announced plans Monday for an oil and gas drilling lease program at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, clearing the way for drilling in remote Alaska.
Bernhardt said future leases on the federally owned land will make the entire 1.5 million-acre (about 600,000 hectares) area of the coastal plain available.
The secretary added that the announcement “marks a new chapter in American energy independence” and predicted it could “create thousands of new jobs.”
Drilling in these areas of Alaska’s Arctic has long been controversial and the plans are sure to face legal recourse.
Environmental activists have sounded the alarm that drilling in the Arctic could damage the environment and exacerbate the climate crisis. Climate change has been a key issue heading into the upcoming 2020 elections, and Joe Biden, who is set to accept the Democratic presidential nomination this week, has called for new permits for oil and gas extraction to be banned. on public lands.
When Bernhardt was asked on Monday whether he pushed because a potential Biden administration might be less interested in moving in this direction, the secretary said he was not “really driven by the dynamic politics«.
“Congress has ordered these tenders, so they have to move forward in some way,” Bernhardt said. “They cannot just be unduly delayed,” he added.
A 2017 law required the department to hold two bids on the shelter by 2024. A date for those sales has not yet been set, Bernhardt said in a call with reporters Monday, adding: ‘I think there could be a lease sale by the end of the year ».
“It requires an oil and gas development program that provides energy to the nation and revenue to the Treasury,” he said. “The law makes oil and gas development one of the purposes of the refuge, and clearly directs me, acting through the Bureau of Land Management, to carry out a competitive exploration and development program for the potentially energy-rich coastal plain. ‘
The Wall Street Journal reported in the first instance about the plans.
Alaska Republican lawmakers Senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Don Young praised the decision.
“This is a culminating moment in our decades-long effort to enable responsible development of a small portion of Alaska Area 1002,” Murkowski said in a statement Monday. “Through this program, we will build on our already strong record of an increasingly minimal footprint for responsible resource development.”
Gina McCarthy, former administrator of former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency and current president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), called the decision an “egregious intrusion into sacred lands. of the Kutchin and other indigenous peoples, ‘and a threat to American wildlife.
Garett Rose, Garett Rose, an attorney for the Alaska Project Nature Program for the NRDC, told CNN on Monday that the organization plans to challenge the decision.
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