Alaska’s Willow arctic drilling project is a climate turning-point. Biden must say no
President Biden faces a legacy-making – or legacy-breaking – decision in arctic Alaska with the $8bn Willow project, the largest oil and gas project currently proposed on US public lands.
If Biden remembers his visionary pledge – forged in the hard truth of human-caused climate change – that the US will expand into clean energy and approve no new oil drilling on federal lands, then his decision should be straightforward.
He will say no.
The world we live in today is not the same as the world of 1968 when oil was first discovered in arctic Alaska, in Prudhoe Bay. Back then, there were about 200 days a year that heavy vehicles could drive on so-called “ice roads.”
Now, it’s down to about 130. The eight warmest years on record have been the last eight. Oceans across the world are warming and rising and turning acidic. Villages are washing into the sea. Salmon are declining. Extinction rates are estimated at 100 times higher than historic levels. The arctic is heating at twice the rate as the rest of the world. And permafrost in many places is no longer permanent.
The single dirt road that crosses Denali National Park, Alaska’s Yellowstone, is closed at the midway point due to a rock glacier, loosened by warming temperatures, that has slumped down-slope and taken the road with it. To span the glacier will require a $100m bridge, paid for by US taxpayers. That’s money spent because of climate change – and just for one road.
Amid it all sits the oil and gas giant ConocoPhillips, indulged by the Alaska congressional delegation and the State of Alaska, wanting more while already riding a wave of record oil profits, and with many options to drill in the state’s existing oil patch. In February alone, the company applied to drill 45 new wells in Kuparuk.
When asked recently about Willow, the US Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, declined to be specific, but said that “public lands belong to every single American, not just one industry.”
If approved in full (not scaled down), Willow would mean the construction of at least 219 wells, 35 miles of roads, and hundreds of miles of pipelines, plus airstrips and a new central oil processing facility, all tied into Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But with construction comes destruction of yet another wild and beautiful place: silent and white in winter, poetic with rivers, lakes, ponds, caribou, grizzly bears and migratory birds in summer, an Indigenous cultural home and hunting ground for thousands of years.
The Interior Department estimates that Willow would release roughly 284m metric tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) over its 30-year lifetime – the equivalent of the annual emissions of about 75 coal-fired power plants.
“This carbon bomb,” the climate activists Zach Brown and Bill McKibben wrote last year in the Los Angeles Times, “would mock [Biden’s] campaign commitments to ease off on new oil leases – and in fact would represent a continuation of Trump-era efforts to drill big in the far north tundra.” The environmental group Evergreen Action says Willow would emit more climate pollution per year than more than 99.7% of all single-point sources in the country.
Some local Inupiat people want Willow, and say it will be compatible with their subsistence lifestyles; others oppose it, some fiercely. “Oil and gas development should not happen at the