The decision to approve an immense new drilling project in the Alaskan Arctic is—to use the President’s words—“a big disaster,” ElizKolbert writes.
, then a Presidential candidate, took a question from a woman standing near the bleachers. The woman asked about oil drilling in Alaska. Biden, in response, pledged, “No more drilling on federal lands, period, period, period.” It was, he added, “a disaster” to drill for oil in the Arctic—“a big disaster, in my view.”
In the form in which it was approved on Monday, the Willow project will produce roughly five hundred and seventy-five million barrels of oil in the course of the next thirty years. By the Administration’s own estimates, burning all that oil will result in the emission of about ten million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or some three hundred million tons over the life of the project. As Politico noted, this “would be the equivalent of adding two new coal-fired power plants to the U.S.
An immense new oil project—Willow is expected to include more than two hundred wells—is obviously at odds with the goal of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. As Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, put it back in 2021, “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now—from this year.
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