Earthjustice Statement on House Natural Resources Committee Legislative Attack on Public Lands in Alaska

The House Natural Resources Committee begins work tomorrow marking up a draft of the committee’s budget reconciliation bill. The current draft of the bill proposes an all-out assault on America’s public lands with a focus on maximum oil and gas drilling in Alaska. The bill language also includes an outrageous attempt to prohibit legal challenges on any project that requires an environmental review, including logging, drilling, and mining projects, if companies pay for their own environmental studies.  Thus, the bill proposes to cut the public out of the process while allowing private companies to dictate what they get to do on the public’s lands.

Some of the specific provisions in the bill’s draft language that affect Alaska include:

• Four proposed lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge over 10 years plus reinstating a canceled and unlawful 2021 lease sale in the Refuge.
• Lease sales every other year in the Western Arctic (National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska) plus fast tracking of seismic exploration and amending the purpose of the Reserve to prioritize oil and gas leasing above all other uses.
• Reinstatement of flawed management plans for both the Refuge and the Reserve from the previous Trump administration that maximize oil and gas development, including in sensitive areas important to Indigenous communities for subsistence.
• Six mandated lease sales in Cook Inlet, with the requirement to offer 1 million acres during each lease sale until there is nothing left to lease.
• Mandates the U.S. Forest Service enter into at least one long-term (20-year) timber contract in each region nationally each year for the next 10 years. The bill also seeks to increase logging by 25% over the amount harvested in 2024 and rescinds Inflation Reduction Act funding allowed for the protection of old-growth trees.

The bill tries to allow the businesses who sponsor projects to pay for an expedited environmental review through a scheme that would exempt such projects from public scrutiny including judicial review.

Earthjustice attorneys in the Alaska Office issued the following statements in response to the bill’s draft language:

Earthjustice Attorney Erik Grafe (speaking on Arctic drilling provisions): “This bill would sacrifice some of the nation’s most incredible wildlife habitat to oil companies to enable tax cuts for billionaires. It also seeks to exempt Arctic oil drilling from bedrock environmental protections and review by the courts, granting unchecked power to the Trump administration and violating basic principles underlying our democracy. We know the climate crisis cannot afford accelerated fossil-fuel extraction, and we know the revenues will never materialize. The Arctic does not belong in this bill — it has sustained traditional ways of life and critical wildlife habitat for millennia, and should not be threatened now so that the ultra-wealthy can benefit in the short term.”

Earthjustice Alaska Office Managing Attorney Carole Holley (speaking broadly on provisions affecting Alaska): “Here in Alaska, temperatures are rising four times faster than the rest of the planet.  We’re facing warmer and wetter winters, and communities already facing forced relocation because of climate change. This bill, if passed without drastic changes, would make things worse by doubling down on reckless oil and gas extraction in the Arctic, maximizing mining and logging on lands valued by the public for recreation and subsistence activities, and halting clean energy projects. It amounts to a giveaway of some of our most cherished public lands to bolster corporate profits, all based on wildly speculative assumptions about revenue generation. At the same time, the language includes an attempt to throw away commonsense safeguards like judicial review and public participation in the resource decisions that affect our state.”