Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, mayor of Nuiqsut, Alaska, compared a small subsurface gas leak at Alpine CD1 this past winter to Deepwater Horizon, the drilling rig blowout in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, which led to the largest marine oil spill in history.
After being introduced to the subcommittee by Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola, Ahtuangaruak talked about how the air in Nuiqsut was so bad during the CD1 subsurface leak in March that people in the village could not breathe and feared for their lives.
That was a whopper, since the air around the site is some of the most heavily monitored air on earth and never went out of normal range.
But the real whopper she told was when the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources asked her who wrote her testimony.
Minnesota Congressman Pete Stauber asked Ahtuangaruak she had written her own testimony. She said yes.
Watch the three-minute exchange here.
Stauber then pointed out that the document’s information panel showed it was authored by Trustees for Alaska’s Bridget Psarianos, a lawyer for the environmental litigation firm.
Ahtuangaruak said no, she had no connection with Psarianos or Trustees of Alaska. Yet, the PDF file clearly shows Psarianos as the author.
The mayor of Nuiqsut was caught in a lie to Congress on the simplest of questions — did she write her own testimony or was it authored by a group that has an active lawsuit against the Willow Project.
The subcommittee hearing was convened to discuss H.R. 8802, offered by Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. The bill would require the secretary of the Interior and the chief of the Forest Service to align management of public lands and waters with the president’s greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. It’ a climate change bill, and it’s a Green New Deal bill, but had no mention of specific projects, such as Willow.
The Willow project was announced in January 2017 is in the Bear Tooth Unit in the northeast portion of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A). Estimated to produce 180,000 barrels of oil per day at its peak, the project will strengthen America’s energy security and stimulate economic growth for the entire region and Alaska. It is supported by Alaska’s entire congressional delegation and awaits a decision by the Bureau of Land Management and federal judges.
In addition to lying to Congress, Ahtuangaruak also hijacked the topic of the hearing and used her time to talk about the minor natural gas leak at CD 1, and her strong objection to the Willow oil project — both topics that were completely off-subject for the bill at hand.
