Finalized plans for N-PRA released, while ANWR leases court decision due today

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The Trump administration released its final plan to open up land for oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The plan covers 18.6 million acres in the reserve, closing 4 million acres to oil and gas drilling, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

“This action is a significant achievement in delivering on our commitment to provide energy for America, from America,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Casey Hammond said in the BLM statement. “With this decision, we are expanding access to our nation’s great energy potential and providing for economic opportunities and job creation for both Alaska Natives and our nation.”

President Trump promised to make America energy dominant, including opening up important areas of Alaska that environmentalists have kept locked away for decades, such as the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

A consortium of of environmentalist groups led by Earthjustice lawyers on Monday asked Alaska Federal District Court Judge Sharon Gleason to stop the lease sale in the refuge, which is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 6, at 10 am.

Gleason has said she would issue her decision by the end of Tuesday. An attorney for the federal government called the damage that the environmentalists claim will occur in ANWR are purely speculative and hypothetical.

The entire hearing was done telephonically, due to pandemic controls in the court system. Gleason has, in the past, given into environmental group’s demands and has ruled against Alaska’s resource economy on multiple occasions.

In 2019, she overturned Trump’s attempt to open vast areas of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to oil and gas leasing, ruling to put back President Barack Obama’s policy that made the Chukchi Sea, part of the Beaufort Sea and a large swath of Atlantic Ocean off the U.S. East Coast off-limit to oil leasing.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Time To Make China Great Agian! Lock up Alaska! American Energy Independence will only weaken The Peoples China. Their people slaved for Americans creating our cheap products, its time the shoes are worn by the other, time for Americans be the slaves unto the chinese. Hahahaha

  2. As usual we get screwed by hysterical environmental snowflakes. Outside of Alaska.

    I’m old enough to remember a couple things. The pipeline was supposed to decimate the Caribou population. It didn’t. Prince William Sound was supposed to be ruined forever. It wasn’t.

    The track record of environmental hystericals is 0 for everything.

  3. The animals know – when you see oil seeping out of the ground into a stream don’t drink it. It’s natural folks. There are oil seeps in many places in Alaska – that’s how they found it in the first place. Greenies, please go back to the land of fruit and nuts and stay there – and be quiet…

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