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Bolstered by Trump, Big Oil Resumes Its 40-Year Quest to Drill in an Arctic Wildlife Refuge

"Republican tax bill is a Christmas gift for the super-rich"

A good little history packed video, with an excellent article attached. Highly recommended for all.

By Bob Reiss September 15, 2017

As the 19-seat Beechcraft breaks from the clouds over the northeastern coast of Alaska, the oil industry’s long-cherished prize comes into view. At first glance, you’d never think that the Eskimo village and brown tundra below would represent the “longest running, most acrimonious environmental battle in American history,” as naturalist Peter Matthiessen once called it. But it’s not what’s on top of the ground that Big Oil covets—it’s the billions of barrels of crude oil that may lie below.

For more than four decades, Alaska’s congressional delegation and their oil and gas allies have been pushing to drill here in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. And more than once they’ve almost succeeded. (The devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound on the southern coast of Alaska in 1989 was a major setback.) There’s a simple reason for their persistence: ANWR is “the largest unexplored, potentially productive geologic onshore basin in the United States,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in 2000.

It’s also one of the rare pieces of unspoiled wilderness left in the world—home to polar bear dens and caribou calving grounds—and remains much the same as it was 10,000 years ago. That’s why environmentalists have fought so fiercely over the years to protect it. “ANWR is an American Serengeti. You can have the oil. Or you can have this pristine place. You can’t have both. No compromise,” says Robert Mrazek, a former New York congressman and chair emeritus of the Alaska Wilderness League.

[...]

Some perspective comes from Richard Glenn, vice president of lands for the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and a drilling proponent. He’s a renaissance guy—piano player, scientist, whale hunter. It’s quite possible, Glenn suggests with a bemused smile, that the fight over ANWR will go on for another 40 years. Indeed, Alaskan cynics have been known to say that the principal industry associated with ANWR is not oil but the lobbyists and fundraisers on either side.

It’s also possible, he reminds me, that it’ll turn out in the end that there’s no oil in ANWR, if it ever does open up. It wouldn’t be the first time an expected find turned dry. “We’re like two people arguing over the contents of a closet,” says Glenn. But neither knows exactly what the prize really is.

Bob Reiss is the author of The Eskimo and the Oil Man and was the Anchorage Museum writer in residence in June 2017.

A version of this article appears in the Sept. 15, 2017 issue of Fortune.

http://fortune.com/2017/09/15/donald-trump-big-oil-alaska-arctic-wildlife-refuge/