Jade Begay
Diné and Tesuque Pueblo
Director of Policy & Advocacy at NDN Collective
The Willow oil drilling project, proposed by ConocoPhillips, is one of the most important items currently sitting on the desks of President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo. If pushed through, it would be one of the biggest and most dangerous new oil operations in the world. Biden and Haaland have the opportunity and responsibility to keep true to the U.S. climate goals by shutting the project down. They have just a few days to do so.
Those pushing the Willow project claim it will bring in substantial revenue for Alaskan residents. But the numbers say otherwise. Last year alone, ConocoPhillips made $1.4 billion in Alaska – which is more money than the local and state governments are estimated to gain from Willow over the next 30 years. The Alaska Native village of Nuiqsut has received only an average of $600,000 from drilling in the Western Arctic over the past decade – which is equivalent to what ConocoPhillips made last summer in Alaska in just two hours. The pennies that are left for Indigenous communities when the oil industry moves into their backyards don’t even begin to make up for the devastation these projects cause.
For generations, the Alaska Natives of Nuiqsut have lived independently and sustainably, fostering a thriving culture in the remote wilderness. But over the last several decades, oil development has slowly surrounded Nuiqsut, polluting the air, pushing caribou and other subsistence resources farther out of reach, and contributing to significant physical and mental health issues for the people.
The Willow project’s 250 oil wells, over 400 miles of roads and pipelines, and noise from equipment, helicopters, and airstrips would push the caribou even farther away from Nuiqsut’s hunters. Its inevitable flaring, gas leaks, and operational pollution would exacerbate the villager’s health issues.
Studies show time and again that Indigenous communities bear far more of the weight of climate change, despite contributing little to greenhouse emissions. The Willow project would emit the same amount of carbon as 76 coal-fired power plants, adding to fires, floods, and famines, which would wreak havoc on Indigenous communities around the world. It would create more than twice as much carbon pollution as renewable energy projects on public lands and waters could remove by 2030, rendering that hard-won progress meaningless.
Further, Alaska is already warming at a rate more than twice as fast as the rest of the United States. The Willow project would exacerbate this rate – which would threaten ecosystems across the planet.
The Arctic is like a windshield and sunshade for the planet: less ice there means less reflected heat from the planet, which leads to more heatwaves, rising sea levels, and more extreme
winters. Whether you’re in Texas, California, or New York, you are dependent on the ice staying icy for as long as possible to avoid extreme weather events like the polar vortex that happened in Texas last year, or the disastrous rains that tore through California just weeks ago. The Biden administration should be focused on building stronger infrastructure to deal with climate change, rather than allowing oil executives to exploit the Earth for their own gain. Even President Biden criticized the exploitative nature of the oil industry in his recent State of the Union Address:
“You may have noticed that Big Oil just reported record profits. Last year, they made $200 billion in the midst of a global energy crisis. It’s outrageous. They invested too little of that profit to increase domestic production and keep gas prices down. Instead, they used those record profits to buy back their own stock, rewarding their CEOs and shareholders.”
If the Biden administration allowed the Willow project to be developed, they would be hypocritically rewarding self interested oil CEOs for their bad behavior.
With this much development in their backyard, the Nuiqsut community understands the federal permitting process and has tried to use it to express their concerns – but as many Indigenous and environmental justice communities experience with federal agencies, their concerns are being ignored by the Bureau of Land Management.
“We explain how the road will deflect caribou and make hunting more difficult, and BLM hears us asking for more road access. We say the helicopters disturb the caribou, and BLM again hears us asking for more roads…While preparing the supplemental EIS, BLM asked for our subsistence timeline, and then BLM scheduled the comment deadline in the heart of our most important season,” leaders of the City of Nuiqsut and the Tribal Government of Nuiqsut wrote in January in a letter outlining numerous complaints about the process and the impacts of the project on their village.
The Biden Administration has admirably committed to elevating Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge in federal scientific, and policy processes. Yet their latest environmental impact statement for the Willow project ignores the Village of Nuiqsut’s traditional knowledge, and misrepresents their input through the cooperating agency process. We cannot allow this lack of real cooperation and blatant violation of the village’s consent to be swept underneath the rug.
President Biden has also promised to take an “all-of-government” approach to meeting America’s commitments to addressing climate change. Approving any of the proposed alternatives for the Willow project would not only be wildly inconsistent with his climate goals, it would also send a message that once again, profits for corporations mean more than promises to Americans and especially, to Indigenous people.
If we are to truly protect our planet, we need to recognize the Arctic is a critical ecosystem in and of itself, and one that must be kept intact to slow global warming everywhere.
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