“Now the Biden administration, at a time when America and our allies need Alaska’s resources more than ever, has decided to go their own way by further locking Alaska down while refusing to consult with the Alaska Natives who actually live on the North Slope,” Senator Murkowski said in a statement. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, called the decision reckless and illegal. Biden’s decision to prohibit drilling in 13 million acres of pristine wilderness in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska and cancel all drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The entire Alaska delegation condemned Mr. It’s a strategy that comes with political risks as oil prices rise and Republicans and at least one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, seek to paint Mr. The Bureau of Land Management also wants to change how it manages the 245 million acres under its control by allowing conservation leases, similar to the way the agency auctions off parcels for drilling and mining.Īdministration officials said the conservation efforts were not new and many of the drilling restrictions had been underway for months. The Interior Department has also raised the royalties that fossil fuel companies must pay to pull oil, gas and coal from public lands for the first time since 1920, while increasing more than tenfold the cost of the bonds that companies must pay before they start drilling. And last month, it said it would remove about six million acres of potentially oil-rich areas from an upcoming federal lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico that is required by law. It insulated more than 336,400 acres of public land around Chaco Culture National Historical Park from new oil and gas leasing and mining claims for the next two decades. Over the past several months, the administration has moved to bar drilling on 1.8 million acres of sagebrush steppe in Wyoming and on more than a million acres of public land in Colorado. President Biden’s decision on Wednesday to block drilling on millions of acres of Alaskan tundra was the latest in a series of aggressive actions recently taken by the administration to curtail fossil fuel extraction on public land and in federal waters.
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