Photo by iStockphoto.com/KeithSzafranski
Since the day congressional Republicans passed legislation opening up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, we’ve known that it would be an uphill battle to defend this sacred place from the Trump administration and their greed-fueled plans to sell it out to corporate polluters. But over the last few months, from public hearings to corporate boardrooms to Capitol Hill, momentum is growing on the side of keeping this special place protected.
Late last week, we got some exciting news in our fight to defend the Arctic Refuge from oil exploration. At a public hearing in Alaska, officials with the Department of the Interior confirmed that destructive seismic testing will not take place in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this winter. The refuge is safe for the winter.
This is a really big deal. Seismic testing isn’t just the first step toward drilling; it would do significant damage before a single drill rig is even permitted. It would mean bringing in industrial vehicles and equipment to the sensitive coastal plain, threatening wildlife including denning mother and baby polar bears, and leaving permanent scars on the landscape. Since a small company called SAExploration put in its application to do this destructive exploration, we’ve been keeping up the pressure to stop it. More than 250,000 people have sent emails and called SAExploration’s offices and executive board urging them to drop their proposal. In January, we supported the Gwich’in Steering Committee and local Indigenous advocates in a powerful action to hand deliver boxes containing 100,000 of those letters to the company’s office in Houston.
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The powerful public backlash against this proposal set back the permitting process enough that the company has now missed its window for the season -- the ground needs to be frozen for it to operate -- and its plans are delayed by as much as a year. It also means that if the Department of the Interior still wants to hold lease sales this year, then any interested oil companies will be bidding blind, without information about what they’re buying or whether there might be oil under the 1.6-million acres of the coastal plain.
That’s not the only thing creating risk for companies that might want to pursue drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Earlier today, new legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives that would restore protections to the Arctic Refuge by repealing the provision in the controversial December 2017 tax bill that opened up the coastal plain for drilling. The Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act was introduced by Rep. Jared Huffman along with a group of 100 original co-sponsors, and we expect similar legislation to be introduced in the Senate soon.
Beyond Capitol Hill, there’s growing momentum among international financial institutions to reject financing for drilling in the Arctic Refuge. In January, multinational investment bank Barclays announced a new energy policy that significantly restricts the bank’s financing of exploration or extraction of oil and gas in the Arctic, stating that any client conducting new exploration of or extraction of Arctic oil and gas will be subject to enhanced due diligence (EDD) and that “under the EDD framework, we would not expect such project finance proposals to meet our criteria.”
Shortly after that, National Australia Bank released a new sustainability report that explicitly ruled out any financing for “oil and gas projects within or impacting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge area.” And this was after leaders of the Gwich’in and staff of the Sierra Club met with Barclays and National Bank of Australia urging them to do just this! Those banks aren’t alone -- some of the world’s largest banks have made similar commitments, including HSBC, BNP Paribas, Royal Bank of Scotland, Societe Generale, and others.
In response to the news about seismic testing, Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said, “When we stand together, we have the will to stop the destruction of the Arctic Refuge.”
Now, more than ever, I know that she’s right.
Add your voice to the thousands that have already spoken out against the Trump administration’s reckless Arctic drilling plans at sc.org/arctic.