President Biden is catching flak from both sides of the aisle for canceling drilling in Alaska.
On Wednesday his administration abruptly revoked seven 10-year oil and gas leases that spanned more than 365,000 acres in a non-wilderness area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Granting the leases was one of Trump’s last actions while in office. Lawmakers and native Alaskans alike supported Trump’s decision.
Nevertheless, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland pulled out the climate-change card to trump Trump’s leases, claiming in a press release that future generations are at stake. She said, “With climate change warming the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, we must do everything within our control to meet the highest standards of care to protect this fragile ecosystem.”
Kara Moriarty, chief executive officer of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, isn’t fooled by Haaland’s sensationalism. Instead she predicts a different, and more realistic, kind of trouble ahead — caused not by climate change but by regulatory overreach. Here’s what she told Alaska’s News Source:
It just shows that our industry is under a constant barrage of attack in the courts, by this administration, by constant talk of tax changes in Juneau. And it’s really unfortunate, especially when you think about, we’re at a time where the world demands more oil, and we should be thinking about producing more here and not other places.
State government officials have exactly that in mind, and it is the Biden administration that may now face lawsuits.
Alaska’s Republican governor Mike Dunleavy accuses the administration of violating a law that Congress passed in 2017. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, he says, grants the Interior Secretary authority “to cancel oil and gas leases issued in violation of statute or regulation, but there was no such violation in the ANWR leases.”
Dunleavy explains that Biden also announced plans to impose new regulations for Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve — regulations that would ban oil and gas development in an area specifically designated by Congress for oil and gas production.
“It’s clear that President Biden needs a refresher on the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine,” Dunleavy said in an official press release. “Federal agencies don’t get to rewrite laws, and that is exactly what the Department of the Interior is trying to do here.”
Dunleavy has promised to sue the administration.
But Biden’s ban has more than Republicans up in arms. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) blasted Biden in a press release for “caving to the radical left with no regard” for either law or energy security.
“Let’s be clear,” he wrote, “This is another attempt to use executive action to circumvent a law to abolish what this administration does not have the votes to achieve in Congress. Canceling valid leases, removing acreage from future sales, and attempting to reduce production in Alaska while taking steps to allow Iran and Venezuela to produce more oil — with fewer environmental regulations — makes no sense and is frankly embarrassing.”
Manchin went on to point out that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 also requires further leases no later than December 22, 2024. It would seem that the Biden administration has no intention to adhere to that part of the law, either.
But the elephant in the room that everyone seems to be ignoring is the fact that the Arctic is not in any sort of danger from the hackneyed fiction of man-man climate change. Remember that Haaland said the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet? Tell that to the sea ice.
It was back in 2007 that then-Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.) warned us that the Arctic could be ice-free by the summer of 2012. Former vice president and global-warming guru Al Gore echoed the same ominous prediction three years in a row.
It turned out that there was a record low in sea ice extent in 2012. It dipped just below four million square kilometers in the summer — hardly ice-free conditions.
But the next year, 2013, The New American reported that Europe’s Cryosat spacecraft revealed sea-ice levels growing “at the fastest pace since records began in 1979.” At the time, experts forecast “the expansion to continue in the years to come.”
Did it ever! Two years ago, the Danish Meterological Institute reported that Arctic sea ice was poised to be its thickest in a generation.
Despite climate alarmists’ invariably consistent track record of failed predictions, they’re continuing the same old disproven theme, with their latest propaganda published in the journal Nature Communications — except now they’re pushing out their doomsday ice-free-Arctic forecast to mid-century. It’s a much safer timeline for them.
Meanwhile, Biden’s net-zero fantasies continue achieving record-high energy prices while whittling away at our energy independence.
Republicans August Pfluger of Texas and Kevin Hern of Oklahoma of the House Energy Action Team (HEAT) berated Biden in a statement, saying that “American families [are] being crushed by high energy prices” as the administration implements “policies that will continue to raise costs and hand-deliver the global energy market to OPEC+.”
They concluded, “Energy security is national security. The President must reverse this disastrous decision and finally recognize the national security importance of affordable, reliable, American-made energy.”
