During his administration, President Trump approved a massive oil drilling project in Alaska . Now a federal judge has reversed his move. Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska ruled that the Interior Department did not fully consider the project’s environmental impact. President Biden had gone along with the ConocoPhillips’ Willow project, located in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The federal government specifically set aside this area to produce oil and gas. The plan was to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day and provide thousands of jobs for Alaskans. About 600 million barrels of oil are contained in Willow. But then it was discovered that Willow excluded greenhouse gas emission levels from its environmental impact report. Gleason called this omission “arbitrary and capricious.” And what about polar bears ? They were left out of the environmental impact report, too. Instead, Gleason said that the Bureau of Land Management acted like “ConocoPhillips had the right to extract all possible oil and gas from its leases.” Despite lots of noise from environmentalists, the Trump administration finalized its Willow plans last October. The deal was to allow ConocoPhillips to produce 590 million barrels over […]
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