The Liberal Gun Club Forum

The Trump administration is finalizing plans to allow oil and gas drilling in a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that has been protected for decades.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will offer leases on essentially the entire 1.6m-acre coastal plain, which includes places where threatened polar bears have dens and porcupine caribou visit for calving. Drilling operations are expected to be problematic for Indigenous populations, many of which rely on subsistence hunting and fishing.

The Democrat-controlled House just hours earlier passed legislation to protect the area, but Republicans in the majority in the Senate are highly unlikely to approve the bill.

The Alaska Wilderness League’s executive director Adam Kolton said that “to no one’s surprise, the administration chose the most aggressive leasing alternative, not even pretending that this is about restraint or meaningful protection”.

“With an eye on developing the entirety of the fragile coastal plain, the administration has been riding roughshod over science, silencing dissent and shutting out entire Indigenous communities,” Kolton said.

The environmentally-sensitive area of Alaska’s Arctic was forbidden for drilling until a change by Congress in an unrelated 2017 tax bill, which Kolton called a “sham of a vote”.

BLM on Thursday issued its final environmental impact statement for the project and said it aims to start granting leases by the end of the year.

The bureau estimates oil extracted and burned from the area could put the equivalent of between 0.7 million and 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere each year. At the maximum, that would be the same as roughly a million more cars on the road annually.

In reviews of a draft impact statement, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said the BLM underestimated the climate impacts of the oil leases.

Parts of BLM’s final statement suggest – contrary to evidence – that the current rapid heating of the earth is cyclical rather than human-made.

“Much attention in recent decades has focused on the potential climate change effects of GHGs [greenhouse gasses], especially carbon dioxide (CO2), which has been increasing in concentration in the global atmosphere since the end of the last ice age,” the document said.

Global scientists, however, have concluded that human actions, including burning fossil fuels, are the primary driver of the 1C temperature increase observed since industrialization.

In other sections, the document notes that fossil fuels contribute to greenhouse gases that heat the planet.

Unmasked: New planned Alaska pipeline could spew 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas — per day
By Sarah Okeson, DCReport @ RawStorySeptember 11, 2019
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Sarah Okeson
Sarah Okeson
800-Mile, $43-Billion Project Is Intended to Send Liquified Natural Gas To China

Republicans are trying to push through a $43 billion liquified natural gas project in Alaska that could be a financial dud, harm whales and polar bears, and help cook our overheating planet.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which by law is supposed to be independent but is now stacked with Trump appointees, is considering plans for an 807-mile pipeline that would carry up to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of gas to an Alaskan port where it would be liquified to ship to Asia.

“This reckless project would hurt polar bears, whales and coastal communities and escalate the climate crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Trump and China President Xi Jinping were in Beijing in November 2017 when an agreement was signed for three Chinese firms to buy up to 75% of the project’s liquified natural gas and help finance it. Alaska’s new governor, Mike Dunleavy, scrapped that plan.

BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobile pulled out of an earlier effort in 2016 after the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie called the Alaska LNG project “one of the least competitive” LNG projects in the world. In January, the Alaska Gasoline Development Corp.fired Keith Meyer, the man who had been leading the project. Exxon and BP are paying part of the cost to help the project get a permit.

Unclear Who Will Buy the Gas

The $43 billion price tag for the project means that the cost of the liquified natural gas could be nearly three times the going rate on the spot market.

“That’s so far out of the market now nobody would return your phone call,” said Joe Dubler, the interim president of Alaska Gasoline Development Corp. “I mean, they wouldn’t even talk to you.”

A draft study of the environmental impacts of the project said it could harm six species that are listed as endangered or threatened: the spectacled eider, polar bear, bearded seal, Cook Inlet beluga whale, humpback whale and ringed seal.