The Alaska Legislature’s resolution in favor of oil and gas drilling within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge received more than two hours of opposition testimony last week, but it continues to move toward passage as one of the 30th Alaska Legislature’s first items of business.
Since 1995, every Legislature has petitioned Congress to open Area 1002 of ANWR’s coastal plain for oil and gas drilling. The plain is expected to hold more than 10 billion barrels of oil. To put that figure into context, the trans-Alaska Pipeline System has transported 17 billion barrels of oil since its completion 40 years ago.
With Alaska facing a multibillion-dollar deficit and still dependent upon oil for more than half of state revenue, even conservation-minded Democrats are supporting this year’s resolution.
Last week, it advanced out of the House committee on the Arctic with the support of the House’s Democratic majority leader, Chris Tuck, D-Anchorage, and its resources committee co-chairman, Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, among others.
The resolution is now in the resources committee, its last referral before reaching the House floor.
In an hour and a half of testimony Thursday, conservationists, tour guides and outdoor enthusiasts asked the Arctic committee to reconsider.
“I’m here because I am a tree-hugging hippy. I’m a tree-hugging hippy … because trees provide the air that I breathe,” said Ellen Mitchell, a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Representatives of groups including the Wilderness Society, Arctic Audubon Society, Alaska Wilderness League and Trustees for Alaska each said ANWR is worth preserving as wilderness because it is an environment unlike any other the North Slope.
“I’m here to ask you to protect the heart of Alaska,” said Bernadette Demientieff of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, an Arctic tribal group opposed to drilling in ANWR.
Rep. Dean Westlake, D-Kotzebue and the author of the resolution, said he is sympathetic to the speakers’ points of view, but he’s trying to represent his constituents.
“While subsistence activities are our first priority and always the first priority for us, jobs are also extremely important,” he said.
He added that he would not have suggested the resolution if he thought drilling could not be done safely.
Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, combined with the pro-drilling stance of President Donald Trump and the position of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, as chairwoman of the Senate committee on energy, mean Congress is closer than it has been in years to allowing drilling in ANWR.
Lois Epstein of the Wilderness Society testified that she is worried that if drilling is allowed, the Trump administration will be less capable of regulating it.
“Now that we have the Trump Administration, we have an Environmental Protection Agency that is greatly scaled back,” she said.
Josephson responded: “I share your concern with the new administration’s ostensible ─ though it’s very young ─ hostility toward environmental interests, though it doesn’t necessarily resolve the question of how I will vote, yes or no, on this matter.”
Additional hearings on House Joint Resolution 5 have not yet been scheduled.
