Trump Moves Toward Drilling in Arctic Wildlife Refuge for First Time in 30 Years
President Donald Trump is moving toward allowing energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the first time in several decades, according to a report Friday from The Washington Post.
Interior Department officials are modifying decades’ old regulations that have traditionally prevented the agency from conducting seismic studies seen as the first step towards drilling, the report notes.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director James W. Kurth told the agency’s Alaska regional director to strike constraints on a rule that allowed exploratory drilling between 1984 and 1986, the last time drilling was allowed in the ANWR, according to a document WaPo obtained.
“When finalized, the new regulation will allow for applicants to (submit) requests for approval of new exploration plans,” Kurth wrote in the August memo. Yet oil and gas drilling within the refuge’s 19.6 million acres can only take place through congressional fiat.
Drilling in the area has become a prickly political football. Environmental activists typically use the remote refuge as a type of Maginot Line upon which the oil industry should never be allowed to penetrate. They believe the area should be off-limits because it houses North America’s last large caribou herds. (Read more from “Trump Moves Toward Drilling in Arctic Wildlife Refuge for First Time in 30 Years” HERE)
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