The Willow project is an act of terrorism against the climate, and the Biden administration has just approved it. This massive oil-drilling project in the wilderness of northern Alaska goes against science and the administration’s many assurances that it cares about climate and agrees that we must make a swift transition away from fossil fuel. Like the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden seems to think that if we do some good things for the climate we can also do some very bad things and somehow it will all even out.
To make that magical thinking more obvious and to try to smooth over broad opposition, the US federal government also just coughed up some protections against drilling in the Arctic Ocean and elsewhere in the National Petroleum Reserve (and only approved three of the five drilling sites for ConocoPhillips’ invasion of this wilderness). Of course, this is like saying, “We’re going to kill your mother but we’re sending guards to protect your grandmother.” It doesn’t make your mom less dead. With climate you’re dealing with physics and math before you’re dealing with morality. All the carbon and methane emissions count, and they need to decrease rapidly in this decade. As Bill McKibben likes to say, you can’t bargain with physics.
You can try to bargain with the public, but the motivation behind this decision is hard to figure out. The deal was inherited from the Trump administration, and rejecting it would have been a break with convention, but convention dooms us, and we need the break.
Biden was elected in no small part by the participation of young voters who supported his strong climate platform. As a candidate he promised: “And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” Six million letters and 2.3m comments opposed to the project were sent to the White House, many from young people galvanized by social media. The American public, Republican minority aside, is strongly engaged with the reality of climate crisis now and the urgency of doing something about it.
I call it an act of terrorism, because this drilling project in Alaska produces petroleum, which will be burned, which will send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it will contribute to climate chaos that will affect people in the South Pacific, the tropics, the circumpolar Arctic, will affect the melting of the Greenland ice shield (this month reaching a shocking 50F warmer than normal). It doesn’t just produce petroleum; it produces huge quantities of it, resulting in an estimated 278m metric tons of carbon emissions.
This makes it, like the Permian Basin oil extraction in the US south-west and the tar sands in Alberta, a carbon bomb. Former vice-president Al Gore recently put it this way: “The proposed expansion of oil and gas drilling in Alaska is recklessly irresponsible … The pollution it would generate will not only put Alaska Native and other local communities at risk, it is incompatible with the ambition we need to achieve a net zero future.”
Earlier, the New York Times reported, “The administration says the country must pivot away from fossil fuels but backed a project set to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil each day for 30 years.” In 30 years it will be 2053, three years after we are supposed to have achieved a fully fossil-free future.
There is actual bargaining in the government’s record of decision, stating that “Permittee shall offset 50% of the projected net [greenhouse gas emissions] … in accordance with US commitments under the Paris Agreement. GHGs shall be offset through reforestation of land …” Pretending that trees are our atmospheric janitorial service belies both the ways that forests across the globe are devastated by climate crisis – burgeoning pests, drought, fire, ecosystems changing faster than trees can adapt – and that planting trees does not necessarily result in a healthy long-lasting forest.
Each tree, according to this document, can sequester 48lbs of carbon dioxide a year. Except that tiny saplings will not be doing that, and it will be too late to help our current climate goals by the time the trees, if they survive, are full-grown. I asked a friend with a talent for math to crunch the data; he concluded that “12.8bn trees could sequester the produced carbon in one year; or, 1/100th of that – 128m trees – could sequester the produced carbon in 100 years”. That’s not a solution to emitting those 278m metric tons of carbon dioxide in the next few years.
Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, an Indigenous Alaskan organization, pointed out in a letter to Biden that this project means devastation: “Approval of a project the size of Willow would be climate suicide. Coastal villages in Alaska are losing land to erosion at breakneck speed, permafrost thaw is causing dramatic changes to the ecosystem and the destruction of oil and other infrastructure, and Alaska Natives are at risk of losing their jobs, homes, and lives in a place which is warming at four times faster than the rest of the world.”
We are already failing to stop runaway climate change. Adding this carbon bomb to the total makes it worse – both for the actual damage to the climate and for the signal the US is sending to the world. The Biden administration has made a colossal mistake.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses