Offshore Drilling in Alaska: Obama Must Slow the Rush

By Margaret Williams, Yale Environment 360. Posted November 19, 2008.

Now that the presidential campaign is over and gasoline has -- for the time being — fallen well below $3 a gallon, the chants of "Drill, Baby, Drill!" have died down. That is a welcome development, for during the campaign voters were lured by the siren's song of offshore drilling and its supposed benefits, while hearing virtually nothing about its costs.

But the truth is that the environmental price of offshore drilling could be very high, and in no place more so than the state where I live: Alaska. And those of us who care deeply about Alaska's offshore waters -- encompassing some of the cleanest and most biologically productive seas on earth -- are hopeful that the Obama administration and the new Congress will act decisively to reverse many decisions of the Bush White House, which moved recklessly to drill off Alaska's coast, with little concern for the environment. Today, few Americans are aware that, during the past eight years, the Bush administration has quietly opened a vast swath of offshore Alaska -- an area more than twice the size of New York state -- to drilling.

While some of the Bush administration's decisions can be undone with the stroke of Barack Obama's pen, others cannot. A concerted effort must now be launched -- in the Congress, the Interior Department, and in the courts -- to rein in the oil and gas leasing, exploration, and development that gathered significant momentum in the U.S. Arctic since 2000.The task is urgent not only because America's "Polar Bear Seas" — the Beaufort and Chukchi seas -- and the salmon-rich waters of Bristol Bay are home to an extraordinarily rich assemblage of fish, seabirds, whales, sea lions, and other marine mammals.

That urgency is compounded because global warming is rapidly altering the marine environment. Regions now open to oil drilling are losing their sea ice, which is very bad news for the creatures, such as polar bears and ringed seals, that depend on that ice to survive, though probably good news for those who would turn this pristine environment into the Saudi Arabia of the Far North.

To slow down the offshore oil rush in Alaska, the new Obama administration should take the following steps.

First, as president, Obama should sign an executive order reversing the Bush administration's decision to drill on 5.6 million acres in Bristol Bay -- home to what may be the greatest run of salmon on earth.

Second, President Obama's Secretary of the Interior must reform the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS), which oversees oil drilling. During the Bush administration, the MMS — plagued by corruption and sometimes staffed with former oil industry executives -- has failed to ensure that proper environmental safeguards are in place before offshore drilling begins.

Third, under leases granted by the Bush administration, MMS has the right to suspend operations for environmental reasons. The Obama administration should invoke those rights until the oil industry demonstrates that it can operate in these extreme environments without risk to wildlife and marine resources. The new administration must prohibit drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, including prime polar bear habitat and whale migration routes.

Finally, working through the Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard, the Obama administration must vastly improve the ability of oil companies to respond to spills of heavy crude oil in Alaskan waters.

Conservation groups such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) -- where I am managing director of the Kamchatka-Bering Sea Ecoregion Program -- are staunchly against drilling in biologically rich environments such as Bristol Bay. We also believe that any new offshore development in the Arctic should only be part of a transitional effort to a new energy policy. Before such drilling is considered, however, scientists must gather baseline biological data and quantify the cumulative impacts on the marine environment.

In recent years, the troubled Minerals Management Service has moved to develop offshore Alaska with an alacrity rarely seen in a federal agency. In the past year alone, the MMS has expanded the territory available for leasing in Alaska's offshore waters from roughly 10 million acres to more than 80 million. Earlier this year, MMS leased 2.9 million acres of that newly opened territory to oil companies in the remote Chukchi Sea. In addition, another 25 million acres of state and federal lands in the U.S. Arctic -- onshore and off — are open to oil and gas leasing; of that,13.5 million acres have already been leased. The only area that now remains totally off-limits to oil drilling is the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

What's the worry? Comforted by massive oil industry advertising campaigns paid for with record profits, the average American could not be blamed for believing that the oil companies can drill oil on land and sea and transport it without a drop being spilled. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The threat of a major oil spill off Alaska's shores is growing rapidly as oil exploration and extraction expand into the Arctic.

See more stories tagged with: oil, arctic, drilling, offshore, spill

Margaret Williams is the Managing Director of World Wildlife Fund’s Kamchatka-Bering Sea Ecoregion Program, which is working on an international conservation strategy for this region.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Water! Sign up now »