On March 13, 2023, the Biden administration approved the Willow Project. For those who may not know, the Willow Project is a massive oil drilling project in the national petroleum reserve in Alaska.
“The oil drilling project is going to increase energy production in the United States,” said Donna Lesch, environmental science teacher. “So we will be more dependent on our resources and less dependent on farm oil.”
The issue we are being faced with is that the project would generate enough oil to release 9.2 million metric tons of carbon pollution a year, which will add to global warming. To put this in perspective, it is equivalent to adding around two million gas powered cars to the roads all at once.
“It seems we are counteracting all the good people are trying to do, like alternative fuels and solar panels, here we are trying to reduce it and we go ahead and approve this project,” Lesch said.
Aside from the climate change aspect of it, the construction of the sites will also take up 11 miles of roads and 20 miles of pipelines which can impact caribou migration.
Even students here at Woodland have been bringing up concerns about this project, showing just how much this is impacting not only Alaska, but the whole world.
Jess Block, Woodland civics teacher, understands the impact.
“Those bringing it up have emphasized the scale of the project–the largest ever oil drilling project on US public land,” said Block. “These students have brought up concerns about animals dying and losing their habitats, as well as CO2 being released into the air, and plantlife dying– basically the whole ecosystem of this vast area of our planet being disrupted or destroyed.”
The political controversy surrounding this project is that the Biden administration had planned to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, and this seems to be moving in the opposite direction. President Biden also promised to end new oil and gas drilling on federal lands.
“Our president pledged not to do this and is going back on that campaign promise,” said Block.
The original, approved plan was to plant more trees on national lands, which would reduce the net emissions by 50%, but this proposal was dropped. On March 12, 2023, however, Biden announced that he will not allow drilling in about three million acres of the Arctic Ocean to ensure that the habitats for whales, seals, polar bears and other wildlife will be protected.
The people who are in favor of the project are surprising to many.
“The bipartisan congressional committee and native groups support it because it is going to create a lot of jobs and infusion of money. They’re hurting economically and that’s what they are focused on fixing. The locals who live near the project however are against it,” said Lesch.
It is essentially a money grab, so they are not too concerned about the everlasting effects that it may cause. The overall consensus is that the Willow Project will have mostly negative impacts that very few people will benefit from, and we need to take action against it.
You can help take action against this with the link below: www.protectthearctic.org/stop-willow
