拜登批准阿拉斯加石油開發 五大環團聯合提告反對「柳樹計畫」

Warning that the U.S. government’s environmental review fails to account for the full climate impact of oil development in Alaska, five of America’s largest conservation groups have filed a lawsuit to stop ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project in the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska, which the Biden Administration approved Monday. In a separate lawsuit, six Alaskan and national conservation and Indigenous groups asserted a similar legal challenge.

Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace USA, and the Natural Resources Defense Council object to the oil extraction project because it will “add about 260 million metric tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere over the next 30 years – the equivalent of nearly 70 coal-fired power plants operating for a year.”

The plaintiff groups argue that the project would cause irreparable harm to the environment, Arctic wildlife and nearby people who depend on the land for subsistence.

On behalf of their more than 10 million members, the five groups argue that opening up this fossil fuel reservoir and burning the 180,000 barrels of oil per day the Willow project is expected to produce at its peak, will intensify climate change and undermine President Joe Biden’s own promises to halve U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and transition the country to clean energy.

ConocoPhillips and other supporters of the drilling argue it will decrease American dependence on foreign energy supplies, create thousands of jobs, and deliver up to $17 billion in new revenue to the federal government, the State of Alaska and North Slope Borough communities.

Supporters of the Willow project include all three members of the Alaska congressional delegation: Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, and Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, as well as the Alaska State Legislature by unanimous vote.

This is the second time the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, has approved the Willow project. The Republican administration of former President Donald Trump first greenlighted the project in 2020.

Conservation and Alaska Indigenous groups challenged that approval in federal court, and the court rejected it as unlawful in 2021. The judge instructed BLM to reassess the project’s full climate impacts and consider alternatives that would lessen its overall impacts.

The plaintiff groups argue that in approving Willow for the second time, the Biden Administration has failed to heed the judge’s instructions, instead producing an environmental analysis that again fails to consider the project’s impacts on climate.

As approved, the project includes three drill sites, gravel roads, a central processing facility, an operations center, an air strip, hundreds of miles of ice roads. It allows drilling and roads in the Teshekpuk Lake special area, one of the most important and sensitive areas in the Arctic.

The Indigenous and Alaskan lawsuit maintains that the Willow project’s effect on the climate of the rapidly warming Arctic directly harms polar bears. “The proportion of females denning on land has increased significantly as sea ice diminishes due to climate change. Polar bears are particularly vulnerable to sea ice melt given their life history and specialized habitat needs. The Southern Beaufort Sea (SBS) population is among the most imperiled polar bear populations in the world, having declined dramatically since the 1990s,” the groups point out in their court filing.