The Trump Administration Is Prepping to Sell off Alaska’s Arctic to Oil and Gas Companies

The Trump administration is moving to take Arctic lands that have never seen industrialization and open the doors wide for fossil fuel drilling.

The Interior Department announced on Thursday, Oct. 23, that it has opened the entire 1.56 million acres of the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing. These lands are sacred to the Gwich’in Nation and are home to irreplaceable wildlife and wilderness.

The administration’s agenda for the Arctic doesn’t end here. It aims to maximize drilling across the entire region: The Interior Department is currently requesting comments on which areas of the Western Arctic it should open to oil and gas development this winter while finalizing a repeal of protections for ecologically and culturally significant areas within the region. You can submit your comment here:

These plans are unfolding as western Alaska residents deal with the devastating aftermath of the remnant storm of Typhoon Halong – the type of extreme weather event that is becoming more common as climate change advances. We can’t afford to hasten even more climate disaster by greenlighting more drilling.

Earthjustice has spent decades fighting in court to keep oil and gas interests from tearing up the Arctic, for the sake of the wildlife that can’t live elsewhere, the communities that have made their home here for generations, and an entire planet that can’t afford more climate pollution. We are ready to fight again.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

Only the beginning

The administration and its allies in Congress are maximizing oil-and-gas development across the Arctic.

The budget reconciliation bill passed earlier this year mandated at least five lease sales in the Western Arctic over the next 10 years. The Trump administration is also in the process of finalizing the readoption of a plan from the first Trump administration that maximizes  the land available in the Western Arctic for oil production and the repeal of a 2024 rule that afforded protections against oil and gas drilling to certain lands within the Western Arctic.

Taken together, these actions will open most of Alaska’s Arctic to drilling. That includes some of the most sensitive areas like Teshekpuk Lake, endangering the Western Arctic’s wildlife and our climate.

Caribou make their way across the Teshekpuk Lake area of northern Alaska. (Kiliii Yuyan for Earthjustice)

What’s special about Alaska’s Arctic regions?

The Western Arctic is the nation’s largest intact tract of public land and remains largely undeveloped. It covers 23 million acres of diverse habitats, ranging from tundra and wetlands to mountain foothills, grassy uplands, riparian areas, and river deltas.

The region is home to iconic and imperiled wildlife species like polar bears and seals that depend on sea ice and includes habitat for caribou and other species that are central to the cultural practices and food security of nearby Indigenous communities. The Western Arctic also attracts migratory birds from every continent on earth, and hosts some of the highest densities of breeding shorebirds in the world.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge covers about 19.3 million acres in northeast Alaska and is the largest national refuge in the United States. It supports a broad range of species including caribou, brown, black, and polar bears, Dall sheep, moose, foxes, muskoxen, marine mammals including whales and seals, and numerous birds. Within the coastal plain are the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd, which have sustained Gwich’in people for generations. These caribou and the coastal plan are sacred to the Gwich’in people.

Caribou in the Western Arctic, near the Lake Teshekpuk area. (Kiliii Yuyan for Earthjustice)

What are the harms of Arctic drilling?

Climate consequences

Alaska’s Arctic is already warming three to five times faster than the rest of the planet. Communities and infrastructure in Alaska are at risk from thawing permafrost, the loss of sea ice, and rapid coastal erosion.

Communities in Alaska and elsewhere are already suffering devastation due to intensified storms linked to climate change.  Coastal storms like those that just swept through the region have become more frequent, intense, and destructive due to the loss of sea ice, warmer ocean temperatures, coastal erosion, and rising sea levels attributed to climate change.

Fossil fuel drilling sites in Alaska’s Western Arctic. (Kiliii Yuyan for Earthjustice)

Economically short-sighted

The Trump administration isn’t accounting for the real economic costs of these corporate public lands giveaways, costs that fall on taxpayers nationwide as well as Alaska residents. The costs of climate change impacts aren’t being adequately factored in. Furthermore, locking in further dependence on expensive fossil fuel infrastructure could jeopardize future clean energy investments nationwide, setting back the urgent need to de-carbonize our energy systems while also driving up utility bills.

Other Arctic regions under threat

The Arctic Ocean: According to a leaked plan for offshore drilling, the administration is also planning to offer leases in the Arctic Ocean as early as next year, where drilling would risk catastrophic oil spills in icy waters that could not be contained.

A bowhead whale and calf surface in the Arctic Ocean. (Amelia Brower / NOAA)

What is Earthjustice doing?

Earthjustice has worked for decades in the courts and in the halls of Congress to protect America’s Arctic, and our victories have helped secure vital safeguards for these precious lands and waters:

• In 2013, we helped win federal protections for some of the most ecologically important wetlands in the Arctic, including Teshekpuk Lake, protecting them from drilling for over a decade.
• Under the first Trump administration, we won a case that protected the vast majority of the Arctic Ocean from offshore drilling.
• In 2022, an Earthjustice lawsuit helped halt the Peregrine oil exploration project, which would have released carbon emissions equal to 173 coal-fired power plants operating for a year.

We will not stand idly by while the Trump administration sells the Arctic off to the oil and gas industry.