Biden’s Approval of Alaska Oil Project Shows Inconsistency of Our First “Climate President” – By Oliver Milman (Mother Jones) / Mar 15, 2023
His campaign promise—”no more drilling on federal lands, period”—has clashed with reality.
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Joe Biden continues to confound on the climate crisis. Hailed as America’s first “climate president,” Biden signed sweeping, landmark legislation to tackle global heating last year and has warned that rising temperatures are an “existential threat to humanity.” And yet, on Monday, his administration decided to approve one of the largest oil drilling projects staged in the US in decades.
The greenlight given to the Willow development on the remote tundra of Alaska’s northern Arctic coast, swatting aside the protests of millions of online petitioners, progressives in Congress and even Al Gore, will have global reverberations.
There are more than 600 million barrels of oil available to be dislodged by ConocoPhillips over the next 30 years, effectively adding the emissions of the entire country of Belgium, via just one project, to further heat the atmosphere.
