President Joe Biden (D) is working to choke an oil and gas lease sale in Alaska in the final months of his tenure in the White House.
On Wednesday, his administration moved to “narrow the scope” of the sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Washington Post reported.
The action comes just after former President Donald Trump won a stunning election victory on Tuesday. The Post report noted the president-elect has said he will boost drilling in the area.
In 2017, Trump “signed a tax bill mandating at least two lease sales in the refuge’s 1.6 million-acre coastal plain by the end of 2024,” the Post said.
The article continued:
Two weeks before Trump left office in 2021, the Interior Department auctioned off the first of these leases to oil companies and an Alaska state agency. But the Biden administration suspended and then canceled those leases, saying Interior had done an “insufficient analysis” of drilling’s impact in the environmentally sensitive region.
Now, the Biden administration is seeking to narrow the second lease sale without violating the 2017 law that requires it.
Data from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in March 2022 showed that approved permits to drill oil and gas on public lands experienced a large drop under Biden, Breitbart News reported at the time.
In April 2024 the Democrat administration announced restrictions regarding oil and gas leasing “on more than 13 million acres of an Alaskan petroleum reserve to conserve land valuable to the ‘Alaska Native people’ and ‘important fish and wildlife,'” according to Breitbart News.
The outlet noted the Alaska Republicans shared their disagreement with the administration:
A group of lawmakers, headed by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), made a statement ahead of the Interior Department’s announcement, with Sullivan calling it an “illegal” attack on the state’s oil and gas industry.
“Today we are here to discuss how the Biden administration is fine with our adversaries producing energy and dominating the world’s critical mineral markets while shutting down those in America,” Sullivan said in a speech.
Biden is expected to address the nation Thursday following Trump’s victory.
