Oil and Wildlife Along the Frozen Arctic Coast: The Saga of a Federal-State Struggle Over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Submerged Lands (original) (raw)
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POLAR GEOGRAPHY, 2024
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR or the Refuge) has been at the core of the conservation-development debate in the U.S. for over fifty years. The Refuge case epitomizes how policies shape territories governed by overlapping federal, congress, local, and Indigenous regimes. For instance, between 2017 and 2023, the Refuge was opened and closed to hydrocarbon development by two U.S. Presidents. ANWR is among the largest environmental refuges in the U.S. with oil reserve between 4.3 and 11.8 million barrels. Our analysis of U.S. policies about the ANWR shows the contestation between pro-environment and pro-oil development at the federal and state levels. Federal policies of Republican and Democrat administrations align with pro-drilling and pro-environment positions, respectively. Alaskan policymakers are pro-drilling, which puts them at odds with pro-environment legislators from Democratic states. Tensions between Alaska and the Federal government are about control and distribution of the oil revenue. Further, Indigenous peoples are on different sides as well. Traditional Gwich’in oppose development because it threatens their way of life. Iñupiat favor oil development because oil revenue has supported their modernized lifestyle. The fate of the ANWR will shape what happens with protected areas in the U.S. and with species across national boundaries.
Environment, Development and Sustainability, 2007
Contrary to claims from American politicians, lobbyists, and oil and gas executives, allowing energy development in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) will harm the environment, compromise international law, erode the social significance of wilderness protection, and ultimately fail to increase the energy security of the United States. After exploring a brief history of the ANWR controversy, this piece argues that the operation of oil and gas refineries in ANWR will release discharged solids, drilling waste, and dirty diesel fuel into the ecosystem's food-chain, as they have from oil operations in Prudhoe Bay. Less obvious but equally important, oil and gas exploration in ANWR will violate a number of international treaties on biodiversity protection. In the end, development in ANWR will threaten the concept of wilderness protection, and will do little to end US dependence on foreign sources of energy.
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Alaska's narrow economy, dependent on federal spending and on absentee investment in exploitation of the state's natural resources, has generated especially vehement, comprehensive resistance to federal environmental protection of the state's wilderness areas. Falsely persuaded that the federal government has reneged on promises made at statehood in 1959 to develop resources on its Alaska lands, Alaska politicians, with broad public support, accuse federal ofcials of systematically impeding the state's economic advance. They do so despite a landmark case in federal court that declared the state's claims invalid. On January 25, 2015 the White House released to the press a one-minute video, shot on board Air Force One, in which President Barack Obama announced that the Department of the Interior had developed a new fifteen-year management plan for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The plan, he said, calls for managing as wilderness the coastal plain of the refuge, the use of which the 1980 Alaska lands act left to Congress to decide. The coastal plain, about 8 percent of the refuge, is potentially rich in oil. In the video, the president called upon Congress to officially to designate the coastal plain as protected wilderness. Oil industry spokespeople, Alaska political leaders, and resource development lobbyists oppose designating the area as wilderness. They have called on Congress repeatedly to open the coastal plain to exploratory oil drilling.
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This Article provides context for the controversy facing government agencies charged with making decisions about the future of America’s Arctic Ocean. It then distill themes that, if addressed, could help further a lasting solution for this region that respects its natural and human values while crafting a reasonable path forward for decisions about development. First, this Article offers background about the region, the threats facing it, and some of the challenges in managing the natural resources there. Second, it provides an overview of the legal framework through which the United States government makes decisions about whether and under what conditions offshore oil and gas activities should occur. Third, this Article highlights decisions about Arctic Ocean resources that have been made pursuant to that legal framework and discusses the resulting court challenges. Based on that review, this Articles concludes that the controversy has resulted in large part from: (1) the failure ...
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For decades, Arctic Alaska has provided US mainland states with plentiful oil supplies. As reserves in the Prudhoe Bay fields decrease, however, the USA has been forced to consider new options to guarantee the nation’s energy security. While debates continue to rage about its reliance on foreign oil, increased prices, consumption levels, and climate change, the USA is now contemplating whether predicted new discoveries might actually allow it to become an exporter rather than importer of oil and gas in the near future. This paper considers the role Arctic Alaska might play in helping secure future US energy security and independence. It also considers what other options exist for securing the State of Alaska’s own future post-Prudhoe Bay.
Fisheries in the United States are governed under a composite of overlapping federal, multi-state, state, and tribal authorities and are conditioned by treaties and compacts. In general, individual states have jurisdiction over fisheries in lakes, streams, and rivers within state boundaries, and in marine waters within three miles of their coast. For Texas and the Gulf of Mexico coast (i.e. the west coast) of Florida, state jurisdiction extends to nine miles. Before 1976, federal jurisdiction included fisheries in lakes, streams and rivers within federal lands and in waters from three to twelve miles (or nine in Texas and Florida) offshore. That authority was extended to 200 miles pursuant to the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (renamed the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act, MSFCMA, in the 1996 reauthorisation). Multi-state compacts, such as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commissio...
Oil and Gas Resources on Special Federal Lands: Wilderness and Wildlife Refuges
Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 1986
As de f i ned land retaining its primeval character and inf l uence, human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which 1. generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; 2. has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a pr imitive and unconfined type of recreation; 3. has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaircd condition; and 4. may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientif i c, educational, scenic, or historical value."
Arctic Policy of the United States: An Historical Survey
The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic Policy and Politics, 2019
Of the eight Arctic nations, the United States has been notably slow to develop clear and coherent policies for the region, both domestic and international. Perhaps because Alaska is not contiguous with the other states of the federal union, and the great majority of the country's citizens lack any Arctic experience or exposure, Alaska's Arctic has been rather out of sight and out of mind for American policy makers. But, new developments have prompted new attention to the region. Recently, global climate change has affected the Alaskan Arctic dramatically. Fierce storms caused by warmer weather cycles have eroded shoreland on which Inuit villages are located, which has generated the challenge of moving the villages. Shrinking annual polar ice has opened new access to the Northwest Passage. At the same time, reduced ice coverage of the sea has diminished hunting habitat for polar bears and haul-out environments for walrus, leading ecologists to ponder the future of these species. Melting permafrost has brought instability to some areas of the built environment, and has begun to release unprecedented levels of methane into the atmosphere. Having to confront these developments, American policy makers have directed new attention to the Arctic. Shifting decisions on offshore oil and gas exploration and production, together with the pending sale of leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflect new considerations in national energy policy. At the same time, growing awareness of Russian and other countries' interest in Arctic sovereignty and in pursuing new opportunities for economic development have raised significant questions regarding national security. These changed conditions have encouraged new consideration of the nation's Arctic policy and the need for greater administrative attention.