Why We’re Fighting Trump on Multiple Fronts to Protect the Arctic

The Trump administration is continuing its all-out assault on public lands and waters in Alaska’s Arctic to maximize oil and gas drilling for the benefit of corporate polluters.

Earthjustice has spent decades fending off oil and gas drilling proposals in the region’s most sensitive landscapes to protect irreplaceable ecosystems, traditional ways of life, and our planet. By fighting to keep fossil fuels in the ground in Alaska and elsewhere, we are helping to rein in a worsening climate crisis that is warming the Arctic nearly four times faster than anywhere else. Alaska needs ways to power its economy that respect its lands and people – not this.

Now this work is more urgent than ever. The Trump administration wants to offer more than 19 million acres of land in the far north to the highest-bidding fossil fuel companies, including regions that have never been developed or targeted for drilling. But we don’t need the oil: This plan is unfolding when the U.S. is already producing more crude oil than any country in history.

As the Trump administration pushes to ramp up fossil fuel development in the Arctic, Earthjustice is preparing to challenge these actions in court.

Arctic Ocean

Beaufort
Sea

Nuiqsut

Chukchi
Sea

Prudhoe Bay

Coastal Plain

Teshepuk Lake

Western Arctic(National Petroleum
Reserve-Alaska)

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Russia

Arctic Circle

Canada

Alaska

Bering
Sea

Gulf of
Alaska

Peter Hoey for Earthjustice

The Western Arctic (also called the "National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska" or NPR-A) is home to many millions of acres of specially designated lands because of their ecological and cultural importance. This includes Teshekpuk Lake, a wetlands area critical for migratory birds from around the world.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the country’s largest national refuge and home to diverse wildlife and Indigenous communities. Within the Arctic Refuge’s Coastal Plain are the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd.

Protecting the Arctic Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain

Our Fight:

On Jan. 13, we restarted our long-running legal fight to protect the 1.56-million-acre Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge from unlawful oil drilling. We originally sued the first Trump administration in 2020 when it opened this sacred area to oil drilling and held a lease sale. We’re back in court after the second Trump administration last October issued a decision reopening the entire Coastal Plain to oil leasing and reactivated the oil drilling leases sold during the first Trump administration.

When it opened the Refuge’s Coastal Plain to oil and gas development, the administration failed to ensure that threatened Southern Beaufort Sea polar bears and the habitat they depend on will not be harmed. The administration’s actions violate several core environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Our lawsuit — filed with NRDC, who is co-counsel, and representing NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Friends of the Earth — challenges these illegal leasing programs under NEPA, the ESA, the National Wildlife Refuge Act, the Wilderness Act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Polar bears on the coast of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Florian Schulz / protectthearctic.org)

What’s at stake:

The Coastal Plain is irreplaceable wildlife habitat and sacred Indigenous land.

This leasing program poses considerable risks to polar bears, including the loss of important denning habitat, disturbance of denning mothers, and increased human-bear conflicts. The government acknowledges that the program is likely to lead to the death of cubs. Yet it gave its stamp of approval and declined to impose adequate protective measures for the bears.

The Coastal Plain is also the calving ground for the Porcupine Caribou Herd and supports millions of migratory birds, marine mammals, muskox, fish, and more. For the Gwich’in people who have lived here since time immemorial, this land is spiritually and culturally essential. The leasing plan would threaten these irreplaceable resources.

Caribou on the coastal plane of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. (Florian Schulz / protectthearctic.org)

Stopping Western Arctic Oil Exploration

Our Fight:

In December, Earthjustice sued the Trump administration for approving ConocoPhillips’ plans to tear up and plunder the Western Arctic, a vast public land area to the west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The region covers 23 million acres of diverse habitats, ranging from tundra and wetlands to mountain foothills, grassy uplands, riparian areas, and river deltas.

The Trump administration approved this project without taking steps to mitigate the harms from these activities, as it is required to do by law. It also gave the public shockingly little opportunity for input, ending its comment period after just a week without any public meeting and then quickly approving the project.

This move by the administration is part of a push to maximize drilling across the entire Arctic region of the U.S. It’s also illegal, which is why Earthjustice is suing as part of our decades-long work to keep much of this last wild place still wild.

We are also challenging the environmental review on which the BLM plans to rely for future lease sales in the Western Arctic. The BLM has announced it intends to hold a lease sale as soon as this winter. It has re-adopted a plan from its first administration that would open 82% of the Western Arctic, including the critically important Teshekpuk Lake area, to oil and gas leasing. Earthjustice stands ready to protect these lands from this massive expansion of oil drilling.

Two terns in the Western Arctic, near Lake Teshekpuk. (Kiliii Yuyan for Earthjustice)

What’s at stake:

The Western Arctic is the nation’s largest intact tract of public land, and it remains largely undeveloped. 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.

ConocoPhillips’ exploratory drilling program would subject hundreds of square miles to a caravan of industrial traffic, including bulldozers and 90,000-pound trucks. And by approving a management plan that allows oil and gas leasing on most lands in the Western Arctic, including in ecologically sensitive areas that have previously been off limits to oil drilling, this administration is prioritizing fossil fuel production over all other uses of these lands.

Earthjustice will continue fighting in court to keep oil and gas interests from destroying the Arctic and fighting fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis. We stand ready to defend against unlawful actions by this administration.

Your donations today keep us in court tomorrow.