As House Passes Arctic Drilling Ban, Interior Goes the Other Wayhttps://www.rollcall.com/news/policy/as-house-passes-arctic-drilling-ban-interior-goes-the-other-wayThe Interior Department and the House are moving in different directions on Arctic drilling.Hours after
the House voted 225-193 to block oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the agency said it was moving to open a portion of the area to drilling.
The Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to consider any such ANWR drilling ban.Exposing some of ANWR to drilling was a provision of the tax law President Donald Trump signed in December 2017.The Bureau of Land Management released what it said was its final environmental impact statement for the oil-and-gas leasing program for a 1.5-million-acre portion of ANWR known as Area 1002.
In its environmental impact statement, the Interior Department identified three drilling plans — Alternatives B, C and D — and picked plan B as its preference.
The agency said air pollution emissions would “likely be the highest” under plan B because more oil and gas facilities would be included. Aircraft emissions under that scenario would also likely be the greatest, it said in its report.
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According to Carbon Tracker, a financial and climate research firm, $545 billion in oil projects in the U.S. is exposed to so-called “transition risk” — what it will take to move away from a fossil fuel-centered economy and comply with international climate goals to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius beyond pre-industrial levels.--------------------
The Pompeo Doctrine: A Formula for Catastrophe in the Arctichttps://www.salon.com/2019/09/14/the-pompeo-doctrine-a-formula-for-catastrophe-in-the-arctic_partner/https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/09/mike-pompeo-bigger-pentagon-now/159863/?oref=d-river How to seize the Arctic’s resources, now accessible due to climate change (just don’t mention those words!)... Under the prodding of Mike Pompeo, the White House increasingly views the Arctic as a key arena for future great-power competition, with the ultimate prize being an extraordinary trove of valuable resources, including oil, natural gas, uranium, zinc, iron ore, gold, diamonds, and rare earth minerals. Add in one more factor: though no one in the administration is likely to mention the forbidden term “climate change” or “climate crisis,” they all understand perfectly well that global warming is what’s making such a resource scramble possible.
... Usually a forum for anodyne statements about international cooperation and proper environmental stewardship, the lid was blown off the latest Arctic Council meeting in May when Pompeo delivered an unabashedly martial and provocative speech that deserves far more attention than it got at the time. So let’s take a little tour of what may prove a historic proclamation (in the grimmest sense possible) of a new Washington doctrine for the Far North.
“In its first two decades, the Arctic Council has had the luxury of focusing almost exclusively on scientific collaboration, on cultural matters, on environmental research,” the secretary of state began mildly. These were, he said, “all important themes, very important, and we should continue to do those. But no longer do we have that luxury. We’re entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our interests in that region.”
In what turned out to be an ultra-hardline address, Pompeo claimed that we were now in a new era in the Arctic. Because climate change — a phrase Pompeo, of course, never actually uttered — is now making it ever more possible to exploit the region’s vast resource riches, a scramble to gain control of them is now officially underway. That competition for resources has instantly become enmeshed in a growing geopolitical confrontation between the U.S., Russia, and China, generating new risks of conflict.
... “I think that Pompeo is now running foreign policy in the Trump administration in the way that Cheney ran it in the Bush administration, which is to say that all foreign policy decisions seem to run through Pompeo regardless of whether or not they are supposed to” ... “He’s controlling the national security establishment in ways that not even [Vice President Mike Pence] can touch.”
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Longtime Pentagon watchers say Pompeo’s actions are not, in themselves, unusual. Secretaries of State are often openly engaged in policy around combat theaters, said Loren DeJonge Schulman, a former defense hand at the Pentagon and the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
“What’s unusual is Pompeo’s comparative lack of activity in traditional diplomatic arenas,” said Schulman, deputy director of studies at the Center for New American Security. “The comparison between the two makes this stand out.”