The Willow Project is a disastrous Western Arctic drilling plan that could generate as much carbon as 76 coal plants emit in a year, jeopardize the health and traditional practices of nearby Alaska Native communities, and devastate local wildlife like polar bears, migratory birds, and caribou. Thanks to an Earthjustice lawsuit, the project is on hold for now. However, the Bureau of Land Management released a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement and finished a new comment period — which means that the agency is still moving towards allowing drilling. Join us in calling on Secretary of the Interior Haaland to stop the project.
Willow would lock us into decades of oil and gas production and long-term destruction to the Western Arctic. This fragile area of Alaska is already warming three times faster than the rest of the world. To add insult to injury, ConocoPhillips plans to install artificial “chillers” to refreeze the Arctic’s melting permafrost in order to build the industrial oil extraction infrastructure necessary for Willow. This melting permafrost played a role in a recent gas leak at a nearby oil field, which ConocoPhillips kept the public in the dark about for more than a month.
The stakes are too high to let our guard down. ConocoPhillips admitted to investors that Willow is just the first step in its master plan to turn the pristine Western Arctic into an industrial oil production zone. That means that if President Biden allows the project to move forward, he will actually be laying the groundwork for something much larger than even President Trump allowed.
The Biden administration gets to choose: preserve oil industry profits or preserve communities, ecosystems, and the climate. The answer is clear to us, but we need make it clear to the Biden administration. You can do your part by calling on Secretary Haaland to stop the project.
