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Donald Trump’s administration has begun a process to open swaths of Alaska’s wilderness to oil drillers by scrapping Joe Biden-era restrictions as the president pushes ahead with sweeping green rollbacks.
The US interior department on Monday published a proposal to ditch a rule introduced by Trump’s predecessor that protects much of the state’s 23mn acre National Petroleum Reserve from oil and gas extraction.
“We’re changing course and bringing in an energy renaissance that utilises Alaska’s resources instead of burying them under red tape,” said US interior secretary Doug Burgum, who visited the region on Monday.
The move comes as Trump tries to fulfil a campaign promise to the oil industry — and the shale moguls who helped bankroll his re-election — by scrapping environmental rules in an attempt to drive up US energy production.
On the first day of his return to office in January, the president signed an executive order to “unleash Alaska’s extraordinary resource potential” and directed all government agencies to “rescind, revoke, revise, amend, defer, or grant exemptions” to any orders inconsistent with this goal.
The interior department said Monday’s announcement was in line with that directive and said the Biden-era rule, which heavily restricted activity on 13mn acres of NPR land designated as “special areas”, imposed “unnecessary barriers to responsible energy development”.
Industry groups and Republican politicians praised Monday’s decision while environmentalists and Democrats lashed out.
Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican senator from Alaska, said: “Repealing the rule will not weaken our world-class environmental standards, but it will enable Alaska to produce more energy as Congress intended.”
Erik Grafe, an attorney at environmental non-profit Eathjustice, said the Trump administration was seeking “to grease the skids for oil companies intent on industrialising even the most sensitive areas in the western Arctic in pursuit of dirty oil that can have no place in our energy future”.
As president, Biden imposed environmental regulations on the oil industry, including endangered species protections, a clampdown on methane pollution, limits on offshore leasing and the suspension of new licences for multibillion-dollar liquefied natural gas terminals.
The rules riled fossil fuel bosses even as the US produced and exported more oil and gas than any previous period in history. Trump attacked the policies on the campaign trail, blaming Biden for a surge in petrol prices and vowing to allow companies to “drill, baby, drill” if re-elected.
Oil companies’ interest in drilling in Alaska has been lacklustre, however. Many oil majors abandoned the region in recent decades, turned off by green opposition and the high cost of drilling there.
In January, the interior department held auctions for drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — another area of vast Arctic wilderness — but did not receive any bids.