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    Trump officials rush plans to drill in Arctic refuge before Biden inauguration

    In a last-ditch attempt to make good on promises to the oil and gas industry, the Trump administration is rushing to formalize plans to drill for oil in the Arctic national wildlife refuge before Joe Biden takes office. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management initiated the process with a formal “call for nominations”, inviting input on which land tracts should be auctioned off in the refuge’s 1.5m-acre coastal plain region.The call for nominations “brings us one step closer to […] advancing this administration’s policy of energy independence”, said Chad Padgett, the BLM Alaska state director, in a statement.The call for nominations lasts 30 days, which would allow the bureau to begin auctioning leases for land tracts to oil and gas companies just days before Biden’s inauguration on 20 January. The coastal plain region, where land could be auctioned, is considered some of the country’s last pristine wilderness, containing dozens of polar bear dens, essential migratory bird habitat, and caribou calving grounds held sacred to the Gwich’in people.“Oil and gas drilling could wipe out polar bears on the coastal plain of the Arctic national wildlife refuge in our lifetimes,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement.Native communities in the region say they will also be disproportionately affected by the leasing of Arctic lands to oil and gas companies.“The adverse impacts of oil development in these sacred and critical caribou calving grounds will be heavily felt by Gwich’in and Inupiat villages,” said Jody Potts, Native Movement regional director, in a statement. “As a Gwich’in person, I know my family’s food security, culture, spirituality and ways of life are at stake.”The rush to sell leases appears to be spurred by Biden’s very different approach to public land management. He has promised to “permanently protect” the refuge and ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands, making it unlikely that leases will be sold once Biden takes office.Even if the BLM holds an auction as early as 17 January, it’s unclear how much bidding will take place. The oil industry is also having a particularly bad year; two dozen banks have announced that they would not fund fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic refuge. And either way, it could be years before any drilling might take place, given the environmental reviews required to do so.“If BLM holds an auction, but doesn’t get as far as issuing leases, the new administration may be able to avoid issuing them, particularly if it concludes the program or lease sale was unlawfully adopted,” said Erik Grafe, an attorney with the environmental law non-profit Earthjustice.Drilling in the refuge has been fiercely opposed for decades and remains extremely unpopular; the Yukon government in Canada has recently voiced opposition to oil exploration in the region due to the harm it could cause to the 200,000 Porcupine caribou who use the coastal plain as calving grounds.In August, more than a dozen environmental organizations sued the Trump administration to block drilling in the refuge, citing “irreparable damage to one of the world’s most important wild places”.If sales do occur before Biden takes office, it would be challenging – but not impossible – for Biden to walk back leases issued.“Even if leases are issued by the Trump administration, the Biden administration could seek to withdraw the leases if it concludes they were unlawfully issued or pose too great a threat to the environment,” Grafe said.In addition to rushing lease sales in the refuge, the Trump administration has fast-tracked seismic testing for oil on the coastal plain, trimming a permitting process that would normally take up to a year down to a few months. The testing, proposed by Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation, could begin as soon as December and run until May. Environmentalists oppose testing, which involves 90,000lb (41,000kg) “thumper” trucks that could leave permanent scars on the landscape and disturb denning polar bear mothers.The Arctic refuge’s coastal plain has been at the center of a fierce battle over oil extraction on public lands for decades. It was earmarked for potential development in 1980 but remained protected until a Republican-controlled Congress added a provision to a tax bill in 2017 that finally opened the area to oil development.The Gwich’in people, who have lived in the area for thousands of years, have consistently opposed drilling in a land they call iizhik gwats’an gwandaii goodlit, or “the sacred place where life begins”. Their opposition has remained strong as they have borne the brunt of the climate crisis’s impacts. The call for nominations comes during a month when Arctic sea ice is at a record low and temperatures are at a record high for this time of year.“The Trump administration opening up oil lease sales is devastating to our way of life as Gwich’in people,” said Quannah ChasingHorse Potts, a member of the Gwich’in Youth Council. “The Gwich’in people’s identity is connected to the land and animals. We have lost so much [that] we can’t afford to lose more.” More

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    Republicans want to open pristine Alaska wilderness to logging. This is a tragedy | Kim Heacox

    Forests are the lungs of the Earth.Around the world, every minute of every day, trees perform magic. They inhale vast amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and exhale oxygen, the stuff of life. They keep things in balance. And no single forest does this better – contains more living plant life per area, or stores more carbon – than the 17m-acre Tongass national forest in coastal Alaska.Take a deep breath. The oxygen you just pulled into your lungs that entered your bloodstream and nourished your mind was once in a tree.The Amazon of North America, the Tongass is mostly a roadless, wilderness kingdom of mosses, lichens, salmon, deer, bald eagles and bears – all beneath ice-capped mountains, ribboned with blue glaciers, blanketed with green, shaggy stands of Sitka spruce, western red cedar and western hemlock. Trees up to 10 feet in diameter, 200 feet tall, and 800 years old. But while the Amazon is a tropical rainforest, the Tongass, found at the mid-latitudes, is a temperate rainforest, one of the rarest biomes on Earth (found only in coastal Alaska and British Columbia, the Pacific north-west, the southern coast of Chile, and the South Island of New Zealand).A true old-growth forest, the Tongass represents a council of ancients. Indigenous Tlingit elders say it is rich with answers – even wisdom – if we ask the right questions and show proper restraint.And what does the Trump administration intend to do with it?Open it up for business.Their plan, more than two years in the making and spearheaded by the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, and Alaska governor, Mike Dunleavy – all Republicans bereft of a science education and an ecological conscience – is simple and wrongheaded: put the Tongass back to work as a so-called “healthy” forest, according to Mr Perdue. How? By re-introducing large-scale clearcut logging and extensive road building on 9.3m acres. To do this, they must exempt Alaska from the 2001 US Forest Service “Roadless Rule”, an enlightened conservation initiative that applies to 39 states. In short, the Tongass would no longer be protected.A final decision is likely to be released later this month.Never mind that 96% of thousands of recent public comments say the Tongass should remain roadless to protect clean water, salmon streams, wildlife habitat and old-growth trees. Never mind as well that logging the Tongass would create few jobs while adding to an already bloated federal deficit.Logging in Alaska is heavily subsidized.Back in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, taxpaying Americans anted up an average of $30m a year. One deficit sale offered every 1,000 board feet of timber for less money than the cost of a cheeseburger. All while many of the trees were shipped “in the round” (as whole logs) to Asia to become rayon, cellophane and other throwaway consumer goods. Another sale generated only 2.5 cents on every dollar the Forest Service spent building roads and preparing paperwork.And today? To build roads in the Tongass would cost taxpayers up to $500,000 a mile.The wholesale destruction of our imperiled planet’s most life-sustaining forests has to stopAnthropologist and former Alaska writer laureate Richard Nelson, who lived in Sitka, on the edge of the Tongass, once said he wasn’t bothered when he found a stump in the forest. What broke his heart was when he came upon a “forest of stumps”. Entire mountainsides, valleys and islands shorn of trees.Yes, parts of the Tongass can be responsibly cut, and are. Many local Alaska economies use second-growth stands to harvest good building materials.And yes, a ravaged forest will return, but not for a long time. The Alaska department of fish and game estimates that large, industrial-scale Tongass clearcuts need more than 200 years to “acquire the uneven-aged tree structure and understory characteristic of old growth”. That is, to be truly healthy and robust again. This according to scientists, not politicians.The wholesale destruction of our imperiled planet’s most life-sustaining forests has to stop. How? A good first step: vote for politicians who make decisions based on solid science.Between 2001 and 2017, 800m acres of tree cover (an area nearly 50 times larger than the Tongass) disappeared worldwide, all while global temperatures climbed, wild birds and mammals perished by the billions, and fires, hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts intensified. And since 2017? Witness Australia and California.What few large, primal forests remain intact today, such the Tongass, become increasingly valuable for their ability to mitigate climate change. Scientists call this “pro-forestation”: the practice of leaving mature forests intact to reach their full ecological potential. The Tongass alone sequesters 3m tons of C02 annually, the equivalent of removing 650,000 gas-burning cars off the roads of the US every year.The better we understand science and indigenous wisdom, the better we’ll recognize the living Earth as a great teacher that’s fast becoming our ailing dependent. We each get three minutes without oxygen, and we’re not the only ones. It’s a matter of having a deep and abiding regard for all life.Call it respect.“What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart,” Nelson wrote in his memoir, The Island Within. “[N]ot whether it’s flat or rugged, rich or austere, wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its bounty is received.”Kim Heacox is the author of books including The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, the only novel to ever win the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives in Alaska, on the edge of the Tongass More

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    Republican apologizes for likening Covid-19 curbs to Nazis' persecution of Jews

    Antisemitic and Nazi-sympathizing comments made by a Republican state representative in Alaska, who likened Covid-19 safety measures at the state capitol to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, brought widespread rebuke and, eventually, an apology. Alaska’s legislature is due to return on Monday and representatives were told by email they would be asked […] More