On Friday, the Biden Administration’s Department of Interior (DOI) announced that it was shutting out any future oil and gas development, including drilling and mining, across 28 million acres of federally-owned land in the state of Alaska.
As Just The News reports, the 28 million acres in question amounts to an area of land roughly the size of Pennsylvania. Rick Whitbeck, the state director for Power The Future in Alaska, said that this decision will have a negative impact on American energy as well as the well-being of Alaska.
“Today’s double-whammy attack on Alaska’s resource development opportunities makes 65 times the Biden administration has targeted our state’s energy and economic future,” said Whitbeck in a statement. “This administration has completely kowtowed to radical environmentalists in an effort to gain favor at the ballot box. Placing 28 million acres off-limits to responsible development is foolhardy, and only empowers China, Russia and other enemies of our Republic.”
In addition to the 28 million acres, the DOI also announced that it would block a 211-mile gravel road project in west-central Alaska that would have connected several copper and cobalt mines to a major highway that runs through the middle of the state. The road was approved in 2020 under the Trump Administration, but Biden’s DOI Secretary Deb Haaland halted the project and ordered a new analysis, determined to prove that the road would have negative environmental consequences.
The DOI decision on the 211-mile road is despite the fact that the project is supported on a bipartisan basis by all three members of Alaska’s congressional delegation, with Republican Senators Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Congresswoman Mary Sattler Peltola (D-Alaska) sending a letter to Secretary Haaland demanding that the road be re-approved.
“Rejecting the AAP, or approving it in a non-viable manner, would cost us those benefits, prolong our deep dependence on foreign minerals, and magnify the vulnerabilities and atrocities associated with it,” the letter reads. Also pointing out that the road’s construction had actually been mandated in 1980 when Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), the members of Congress declared that “dismissing the fact that Congress mandated access to the Ambler Mining District is a brazen overreach of executive authority.”
The DOI’s decision is representative of the Biden Administration’s war against American energy, repeatedly blocking efforts to produce more oil and gas in favor of so-called “green” energy sources such as electric, wind, and solar.
“The DOI’s decision is representative of the Biden Administration’s war against American energy, repeatedly blocking efforts to produce more oil and gas in favor of so-called “green” energy sources such as electric, wind, and solar.”
So riddle me this, Bat Haaland – where does the ‘electric’ green energy come from? Nuclear? Hydro? The last I heard no USG organization was willing to permit any hydro or nuclear projects.