When the last Republican administration rode into office on a minority vote, slight electoral victory, the GOP knew they were closer than ever to their oily dreams of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Early on in the corrupt tenure of Trump’s administration it became clear that those moves were being put in place. The Trump administration made it very clear that animal extinctions were well worth the money that its donor class could make drilling on federally protected land. Activism, the courts, scientists, and the general incompetence of the administration and its self-dealing swamp creature-filled cabinet were the main obstacles slowing down the dream of turning pristine Arctic landscapes into fossil-fuel industry oil mines. 

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported the Department of the Interior is suspending a number of leases given out at the very end of the previous administration to oil and gas interests. The move is hopefully just the first of many that will attempt to undo the naked greed exhibited over our country’s public resources for the past four years. Specifically, the Post points to the fact that the “Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears.” This egregious abuse of power will reportedly be the angle the Biden administration takes on slowing down this process: arguing that the Trump administration rushed these leases through without the proper reviews.

On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released an order in which she wrote, “My review of the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program (Program) as directed by EO 13990 has identified multiple legal deficiencies in the underlying record supporting the leases, including, but not limited to: (1) insufficient analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), including failure to adequately analyze a reasonable range of alternatives in the environmental impact statement.” The suspension of these leases for drilling will allow the Interior to “conduct a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the Program and address the identified legal deficiencies. While that analysis is pending, I direct a temporary halt on all Department activities related to the Program in the Arctic Refuge.” There’s a reason why Biden’s choice of Deb Haaland for secretary of the Interior was so vociferously opposed by GOP officials with very clear financial ties to the oil and gas industry.

The steps the previous administration made to hide and delay the release of scientific studies that shed an unflattering light on their plans was not simply a red flag of their avarice. It was a statement of their craven felty to the fossil fuel industry and anti-environmentalism. The GOP and the Trump administration are not only willing to sell out generations of Americans just to curry favor with old wealth, they’re willing to do it for pennies on the dollar. After activist groups and Native groups pressured Canadian and U.S. banks into pulling their backing on any drilling deals, the only companies able to put up some money were Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, which took all but two of the 11 bids.

But undoing what the previous conservative crew of shills did will not be easy, as the yet-to-be announced moves will likely set off a series of lawsuits. This is something the Biden administration seems to be trying to balance by defending the indefensible Trump-era ConocoPhillips drilling project, called Willow, on the North Slope of Alaska. As The New York Times reported last week, the Biden administration is defending the project in court.

In a paradox worthy of Kafka, ConocoPhillips plans to install “chillers” into the permafrost — which is fast melting because of climate change — to keep it solid enough to support the equipment to drill for oil, the burning of which will continue to worsen ice melt.

Read that last paragraph again. How does that pass any genuine scientific review? Biden has justifiably taken a lot of criticism on this defense of the Willow project. His campaign promises of cutting carbon emissions drastically in our country seem to fly in the face of potentially producing “nearly 260 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions — about the equivalent of what is produced by 66 coal-fired power plants.”

The Biden administration’s defense is that the area the Willow project is being conducted in, the northeastern portion of the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska, was already set aside by the government for oil and gas development. The rest of the scientific and environmentalist community argues that this has fundamentally always been the problem. On the other side of this are jobs and infrastructure brought to the region by the project. The indigenous Iñupiat, who support the drilling and also serve to benefit more than most local and Native tribes in the region, have voiced their support of the move to defend the drilling.