Confronting the Trump administration’s attack on the Arctic
Earthjustice is defending against multi-pronged attacks, all aimed at maximum drilling
Alaska’s Arctic is a region like no other in our country. It is home to iconic species like polar bears and walruses. Migratory birds from all corners of the globe are born here and return every summer. Indigenous people have lived on these lands and relied on their natural abundance for millennia. The Arctic is also acutely experiencing the effects of the runaway climate crisis — warming at four times the rate of the rest of the world, with rapidly shrinking sea ice, melting permafrost, and dramatic coastal erosion.
Yet when the Trump administration looks north, it sees only oil and dollar signs for its friends in the fossil fuel industry. In a mere six months, this administration and its allies in Congress have set in motion a public land sell-off in the Arctic like none before.
Arctic lands sell-off in Republican budget bill
The recently passed Budget Reconciliation bill, which was pushed through Congress using parliamentary procedures and accounting gimmicks that allowed it to pass by the slimmest of margins, contains two attacks on public lands in the Arctic. One mandates the Department of the Interior to hold four fossil-fuel lease sales in the next seven years in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge of no less than 400,000 acres each. The other mandates five fossil-fuel lease sales in the Western Arctic of no less than four million acres each over the next decade. If the administration pursues leasing and permitting to match its fossil fuel rhetoric, it will likely run afoul of bedrock environmental laws, and we will see it in court. Nevertheless, these mandates add to the already unsettled situation in the Arctic.
Alaska state entity to begin surveying for oil in Arctic Refuge
In the Arctic Refuge, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) — a corporation set up by the State of Alaska — currently holds oil development leases covering about 370,000 acres that it bought in 2021 for a rock bottom price during the first Trump term. AIDEA historically has invested in one dead-end mega-project after another, squandering Alaskans’ money chasing energy sources of the past when it should be investing in a just transition away from fossil fuels and focusing on a sustainable, post-oil economy. It acquired its Refuge leases because none of the major oil companies showed up to the lease sale. AIDEA also recently announced that it intends to double down on its latest bad investment and conduct seismic surveying in the Refuge this winter. Seismic surveying involves driving large trucks across the landscape, accompanied by support camps with dozens of people, sending soundwaves into the ground to detect oil. It threatens harm to the tundra — one can still see scars from seismic surveying near the Refuge from decades ago — and endangers polar bear mothers and cubs, which den in the Refuge in winter and could be crushed or otherwise chased from their dens by seismic activities.

Clockwise from top left: a Porcupine Caribou herd crosses the Kongakut River (Gary Braasch vis NWF); a male polar bear (Paul Nicklen / National Geographic Creative); a flock of Kittiwakes, one of many migratory bird species found in the Arctic region (Ralph Lee Hopkins / National Geographic Creative); a ringed seal (Michael Cameron / NOAA).
How Earthjustice is fighting back to defend the Arctic Refuge
Back in 2021, we challenged the oil program and lease sale that led to AIDEA obtaining its leases. Though the Biden administration froze oil activities in the Refuge, adopted a new and less extreme oil program, and tried unsuccessfully to rescind AIDEA’s leases, our challenge to the 2021 lease sale remains pending at the Alaska District Court all these years later. The Trump administration has said it will make decisions about AIDEA’s leases by the end of September.
Depending on what the administration does, we could continue our lawsuit. Were we to succeed, the Refuge would return to being entirely free of oil leases again, and Interior would be back to square one on its plans to sell off the Refuge for oil development. We are also monitoring AIDEA’s seismic surveying ambitions, and we stand ready to challenge any permits that run afoul of the law.
Western Arctic also at risk
The threats also loom large in the Western Arctic. ConocoPhillips’ Willow development plan is fully under construction, although the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered Interior to reconsider its approval, thanks to a lawsuit we filed. We will be monitoring this process, and we think an honest reconsideration would lead a rational agency to conclude that Willow should not go forward. We are also pursuing a legal challenge that could ultimately require Interior to prepare a new environmental review before holding any future lease sales. Finally, ConocoPhillips has announced that it intends to conduct large-scale exploration this winter in service of expanding its operations even further beyond Willow. We will be monitoring its applications and ready to challenge any permits that violate the law.
Although the Trump administration’s Arctic attack is now in full swing, we have the tools and the wherewithal to fight back. We aim to hold the administration to the law and to build momentum for more permanent protections for Arctic lands and waters that honor their irreplaceable ecological and cultural values and the needed transition to a clean energy future that will sustain this region, and the planet, for generations to come.
Opened in 1978, our Alaska regional office works to safeguard public lands, waters, and wildlife from destructive oil and gas drilling, mining, and logging, and to protect the region's marine and coastal ecosystems.
