Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) called the Biden administration’s plan to prohibit oil drilling and essential mineral extraction on millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness “national security suicide.”
Yes, it’s anarchic. He lacks the authority to carry it out. In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sullivan stated on Sunday, “It’s, as I say, national security suicide.”
Alaska and the federal government have long disagreed over how to use and safeguard its vast natural resources, especially during Democratic administrations.
The Ambler Road, a planned 211-mile thoroughfare that would have extended mining operations into an undeveloped area of the state, was officially recommended not to be built by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management on Friday. This recommendation essentially kills the project and places zinc and copper deposits out of reach.
Additionally, the Interior Department released a final rule that will bar new oil and gas leasing proposals from being considered for the entirety of the United States Arctic Ocean, 11 million acres of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, and roughly 3 million acres of federal seas off the state’s coast.
Environmental and conservation organizations, along with certain Native American tribes, praised the Interior Department’s decision, though not all of them, according to Sullivan on Sunday.
“The leaders of the North Slope of Alaska were unanimously against this,” Sullivan said, “when this president and [Interior] Secretary [Deb] Haaland announced on Friday that they did this because the Alaska Native, the indigenous people on the North Slope of Alaska, asked them to, they wanted them to.”
However, several indigenous groups in the area applauded the Biden administration’s choice and said the Trump administration did not confer with them before the project approval.
