The Department of the Interior today announced that the Bureau of Land Management received no bids for the congressionally mandated oil and
From the article:
The Department of the Interior today announced that the Bureau of Land Management received no bids for the congressionally mandated oil and gas lease sale for the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Arctic Refuge). The deadline to submit bids was Monday, January 6. [...]
“The lack of interest from oil companies in development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge reflects what we and they have known all along – there are some places too special and sacred to put at risk with oil and gas drilling. This proposal was misguided in 2017, and it’s misguided now,” said Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis.
This is the second time that the lease sale for this area has fallen through. The writing is on the wall that investments like this have an expiration date as the world transitions to clean energy due to economics and public opinion.
Dark Brandon strikes again! This is the kind of thing you will get when you elect Democrats - if you care about climate change, back the party that’s at least trying to do the right thing (and then push them to go further)!
Between the pandemic and the post-election chaos, both of which are still going strong, maybe the single most important issue in our lifetime, and the lifetimes of all future generations, has been largely ignored. Yes, I’m talking about climate change, human’s destruction of the environment to satisfy their craving for more toys and conveniences. There are, however, a few good things that have…
Financial institutions rarely provide such loans and with oil prices at rock bottom, the Arctic is not a priority for the energy industry.
Excerpt from this story from InsideClimate News:
Over the last several months, some of the nation's biggest banks announced they will not finance new oil and gas development in the Arctic. The new policies are the first steps by American banks to restrict lending to the oil industry, and they come after years of campaigning by environmental groups.
But a close look reveals that the policies may not amount to much at all. That's because they generally limit only direct funding for Arctic operations, while banks rarely, if ever, provide such loans.
In fact, amid trillions of dollars in energy industry financing that advocacy groups have tracked over the last few years, not a single loan represented the type of deal that would be prohibited under the new policies.
"It's safe to say that project financing in particular for extraction in the Arctic is very rare," said Alison Kirsch, a researcher with Rainforest Action Network, which publishes an annual report tracking fossil fuel financing.
What's more, drilling in the Arctic remains one of the more expensive propositions within a global oil and gas industry that has no shortage of other opportunities for growth. Even before oil prices tanked as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, oil companies were facing huge debts to banks that they'd used to fuel the fracking boom. Now, with the industry cutting spending by tens of billions of dollars as oil demand has plummeted, financial institutions may not be eager to support Arctic development for purely business reasons, leaving aside environmental concerns.
Still, advocates argue that the loan restrictions represent an important step in a campaign to end drilling in the Arctic. Ben Cushing, with the Sierra Club's Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign, said the restrictions could make it harder for some smaller oil and gas companies operating in Alaska to secure loans. And beyond any direct impact, he said, the announcements carry symbolic value that could shape public opinion and policy.
JPMorgan Chase announced Monday it will stop providing financial services to companies pursuing oil and gas exploitation in the Arctic and phase out loans to the coal industry. JPMorgan will, however, still finance oil and gas projects outside of the Arctic region. The announcement comes just days after a leaked report by JPMorgan warned the planet is facing irreversible damage due to the worsening climate crisis. The bank is one of the biggest financial backers of the fossil fuel industry and other leading polluters.
Money talks, and that’s why environmental activists—and, more specifically, indigenous peoples—have been pressuring banks for years to stop throwing their money toward fossil fuel extraction projects. Finally, major banks are starting to listen. Goldman Sachs announced Sunday that it’s finally listening and won’t fund new coal projects globally or any extraction projects in the Arctic, including in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The main argument is that banks are funding the climate crisis every time they loan money to fossil fuel companies. Along with that, they support human rights violations when they give money to companies that take land from indigenous people and engage in violent suppression. In the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, that meant supporting a brutal police force that met protestors with water hoses and rubber bullets in 2016.
“Drilling in the Arctic Refuge would permanently destroy the primary food source of the Gwich’in people, our culture, and our way of life,” said Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, in a Sierra Club statement. “The Trump administration may have made up their minds about selling off this sacred place, but the fight is far from over. We’re glad to see Goldman Sachs recognize that the Arctic Refuge is no place for drilling and we hope that other banks, and the oil companies they fund, will follow their lead.”
Despite PR damage over earlier spills, documents show oil firm pressed for reduced regulation
BP, the company that brought us Deepwater Horizon and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the degradation of the Gulf waters and the coastlines, pressed trump to allow it, BP, to continue its dirty shit up in the Arctic. The more you are told that things involving the fossil fuel industry are changing, the more you learn that either that isn’t true, or they’re changing for the worse.
Excerpt from this story from The Guardian:
BP stepped up its campaign to be allowed to drill for oil in the Arctic sea and an Alaskan wildlife refuge after Donald Trump was elected president, according to documents that detail the British firm’s lobbying efforts.
Documents written by BP and oil industry groups show how the oil “supermajor” seized on the opportunity presented by Trump’s 2016 election victory to expand its offshore business, just seven years after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Areas it targeted include the Arctic sea, where experts have warned an oil spill could be an ecological disaster, as well as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), not far from where BP spilled 222,000 gallons of oil atPrudhoe Bay in 2006.
Despite the reputational damage it had suffered after successive spills, BP played a key role in lobbying the government to loosen restrictions on oil drilling, according to documents obtained by Greenpeace’s investigative unit, Unearthed and shared with the Guardian.
Within a year of taking office, the president sought to overturn drilling bans introduced under the Obama administration in the wake of the 2010 spill, in which millions of gallons of oil spewed into the sea off the US south coast.
In February 2017, a month after Trump’s inauguration, the American Petroleum Institute (API), of which BP is a member, wrote to the Department of the Interior calling for the reversal of an executive order by Barack Obama in 2014 banning oil drilling in large areas of the Atlantic and Arctic.
Lobbying disclosures made by BP America show that the company also intervened independently, making representations on issues relating to “Arctic oil and gas development”.
That same month, Trump reversed Obama’s executive order, a decision that was later itself overturned by a federal judge in Alaska and remains the subject of a legal dispute.
