President Obama has withdrawn from future mineral extraction a vast area of the Arctic Ocean, in an effort to protect ecologically sensitive marine life from adverse impacts of oil and gas exploration and development.
The presidential order, which encompasses the entire U.S. Chukchi Sea and major portions of the U.S. Beaufort Sea, was announced in a new partnership with Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau. The partnership is aiming to ensure a sustainable and viable Arctic economy and ecosystem with low impact shipping, science based management of marine resources and a climate free of future risks of offshore oil and gas activity, they said.
These actions set the stage for deeper partnerships with other Arctic nations, including through the Arctic Council, they said.
The withdrawal does not restrict other uses of these federal waters on the Outer Continental Shelf, and does not affect existing oil and gas leases, nor drilling activities in state waters, but Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said it would help to sustain the harvest of marine resources upon which many Alaska Native communities rely for subsistence use and cultural traditions. Such protections would also aid the six community development quota entities established by the state of Alaska to help strengthen the economies of coastal predominantly Alaska Native communities. The CDQ groups, who receive annual quota shares in seafood harvests, provide jobs and other financial benefits to thousands of residents of coastal Alaska through their engagement in the commercial fisheries.
The order is also unlikely to have immediate impact on Alaska’s major commercial fisheries, as action passed by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and implemented by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2009 as a new Fishery Management Plan for Fish Resources of the Arctic Management Area.
The council’s action recognized the different and changing ecological conditions of the Arctic, including warming trends in ocean temperatures, loss of seasonal ice cover and potential long term effects from these changes on the Arctic marine ecosystem. The prolonged ice free seasons coupled with warming waters an changing ranges of fish species could together, the council recognized, create conditions that could lead to commercial fishery development in the U.S. Arctic Exclusive Economic Zone. The council acknowledged that the emergence of unregulated, or inadequately regulated, commercial fisheries in that area could have adverse effects on the sensitive ecosystem and marine resources in that area, and moved to ban the bulk of commercial fisheries there until sufficient research on the impact of such fisheries and related activities could be done.
Commercial and subsistence fisheries notwithstanding, the president’s decision to ban offshore drilling for oil in that vast ocean area drew criticism from Alaska Gov. Bill Walker and the state’s congressional delegation and kudos from several environmental entities.
Walker said the decision “marginalizes the voices of those who call the Arctic home and have asked for responsible resource development to lower the cost of energy to heat houses and businesses.
“No one is more invested than Alaskans to ensure that the habitats within the Arctic are protected,” Walker said in a statement. “To lock it up against any further exploration or development activity is akin to saying that the voices of activists who live n Lower 48 cities have a greater stake than those to whom the Arctic is our front yard and our back yard.”
Walker said that in his telephone conversation with Jewell, that the Interior Secretary acknowledged that the Interior Department took into consideration requests that the state of Alaska had made in multiple meetings with her in Washington D.C. and Fairbanks. “We highlighted the areas of the Arctic most likely to provide revenue to the state,” Walker said. “These efforts are reflected in that those regions were not included in the administration’s final decision. However, this concession is not satisfactory because the administration has already failed to include these same areas in its most recent five-year leasing plan.”
Kara Moriarty, president of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, called the withdrawal “a stunning example of hypocrisy from President Obama.”
Moriarty contends that 76 percent of Alaskans support resource development in the Arctic offshore and 72 percent of Alaska Natives. “It is foolish to believe the United States can have a strong successful economy in the Arctic without oil and gas development,” she said.
Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Congressman Don Young, all R-Alaska, said the withdrawals showed disrespect to Alaska residents, was not based on sound science and contradicted the administration’s own conclusions about Arctic development.
The withdrawal decision “will have lasting consequences for Alaska’s economy, state finances, and the security and competitiveness of the nation,” they said in a statement. The delegation said that Obama had “sided with extreme environmentalists, while betraying his utter lack of commitment to improving the lives of the people who actually live in the Arctic.
“Making matters worse, the joint announcement with Canada amounts to an incredibly lopsided trade for the United States,” they said. “While President Obama’s Arctic withdrawal is indefinite, Canada will review the status of its Arctic waters every five years. With Russian development already underway in the Arctic, it may be just a few short years before our nation is bracketed by activity on both sides and importing the oil resulting from it.”
Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the president’s decision to remove most U.S. Arctic waters, plus a huge portion of the U.S. Atlantic ocean, from oil and gas leasing “a historic victory in our fight to save our Arctic and Atlantic waters, marine life, coastal communities, and all they support.”
Suh noted that Obama used the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act a law employed by many presidents to establish there protections. The “bold bilateral announcement between Canada and the United States shows North America is leading the world in preserving the Arctic for future generations,” Suh said. “President Obama and Prime Minister Trudeau have created an indelible legacy as true stewards of the most fragile and threatened ecosystem in the world, and we urge the other Arctic leaders to follow suit.”
The NRDC is an international nonprofit environmental entity with a membership of more than two million people.
