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Attorney General Frosh Joins Comment Letter on Trump Administration's Attack on Environmental Protections in Alaska Reserve BALTIMORE, MD (January 22, 2020) – Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh, joining a coalition of 12 attorneys general, filed a comment letter condemning the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Draft Integrated Activity Plan to expand oil and gas leasing in the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska (Reserve). The Reserve is the nation's largest single unit of public land and home to critical fish and wildlife habitat on the Arctic Coastal Plan. BLM's proposal ignores the importance of this fragile ecosystem and would open 6.6 million acres of Reserve land to new oil and gas leasing, including habitats that BLM designated off limits in 2013. The expansion would not only threaten important wildlife habitat, but could increase greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas drilling in the Reserve by up to 75 percent, a massive amount that could swamp states' efforts to combat climate change. The coalition maintains that BLM's proposed plan and its accompanying Environmental Impact Statement fail to meet legal requirements under the Administrative Procedure Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act (Reserve Act). "The proposal would allow the oil and gas industry to ravage some of the most pristine habitat left in the U.S., areas that provide essential habitat to hundreds of species of ducks, geese, and shorebirds, not to mention large caribou herds that are indispensable to the area's indigenous communities," said Attorney General Frosh. "It is so brazen, and these areas are so important, that even Trump's own Fish and Wildlife Service has protested development in these areas." In 2013, BLM banned oil and gas leasing in the Reserve's most important wildlife habitats, while also permitting leasing in half of the Reserve's 23-million acres. BLM's proposal would undo this compromise and open millions of additional acres to leasing. Expanding oil and gas development into these ecologically fragile areas would endanger migratory birds like tundra swans, sandpipers, and snow geese that use the region as important breeding habitat, as well as vulnerable caribou herds that subsistence hunters in the region depend upon for food and survival. The proposed expansion would dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions and threatens to upend nationwide efforts to curb the impacts of climate change. BLM's proposal to expand leasing in the Reserve is the latest in a series of efforts by the Trump Administration to undo longstanding environmental protections for the Arctic region of Alaska. This proposal was released just weeks after another similar proposal in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The proposal conflicts with advice from the Trump Administration's own U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which counseled that the BLM reverse course and maintain protections for the Reserve's important wildlife habitat. The Draft Plan suffers from multiple legal defects including the agency's failure to: - Justify new leasing in an area the agency deemed critical for caribou just seven years before, when in fact the status of the Reserve's wildlife has likely deteriorated since 2013 due to climate change;
- Rationally analyze the impacts expanded leasing would have on the Reserve's migratory birds; and,
- Evaluate cumulative impacts of expanded leasing in the Reserve with proposed leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The coalition urges BLM to withdraw the proposal and maintain the 2013 protections in the Reserve. In addition to Maryland, the letter was signed by the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. |
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