President Biden: Stop the Willow Oil Project

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Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

We really need you and your administration to be full-on climate champions and stop the Willow Oil Project. We know you have reduced its scope and proposed protecting sixteen million Arctic acres from further oil drilling. But it is 2023 and that is not enough. Rather than approving the Willow MDP, we urge you to have Secretary Haaland choose the no-action alternative suggested by Senator Markey and his colleagues. Even if you anticipate being sued and losing such a fight, that delay will give us more time to elect to Congress more Democrats who prioritize protecting our environment.

Background

Big Oil is the strongest lobbying group in our history. They have spent billions to keep our economy hooked on oil and gas for our energy needs and to divert focus from the dangerous global warming our fossil-fuel dependence has wrought. They’ve had the economic power to support candidates who uphold these destructive paths over those who suggest rethinking our materialism and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. They’ve gotten the US government to spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives to secure their oil supplies overseas. They have intimidated and/or financially encouraged politicians to initiate dangerous shale oil projects nationwide by promoting a false “necessity” for doing so, even as renewable energy has become more and more cost effective.

Big Oil has been so intimidating to our politicians that it was heartening to finally have President Biden step up as our “climate president” and prioritize climate action in the Inflation Reduction Act as well as in the Infrastructure and Jobs Investment Act. We’d never had a president utilize the economic hardship of an emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic to push our economy into the twenty-first century that way.

That “climate president” won lots of support from younger voters by vowing to allow no new oil drilling on public lands—“period. period. period.” That’s the commitment we need, but it’s also a commitment we need our leaders to keep.

Therefore, on March 16, when our “climate president” greenlighted an oil drilling project on the Alaskan North Slope called the Willow Oil Project, the Sunrise Movement sprang into action, protesting outside the White House.They know that the US has been hooked on oil for far too long.

President Biden, Secretary Haaland, and other officials have said that they reduced the project from five to three drilling sites, and that they would probably have lost a court challenge if they had tried to stop the project altogether, because ConocoPhillips has had leases in the area for twenty years. Our reply is that the court case could delay proceeding with the dangerous project and buy us time to elect more climate warriors to Congress.

The Department of the Interior has also proposed a framework of rules as a firewall against further drilling in the US waters of the Arctic Ocean, which includes blocking leases on more than half of the 23 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. You may think that this had already been done; after all, former President Bill Clinton vetoed a GOP plan to allow drilling in the refuge in 1995. But the two parties have been fighting over the region ever since. The Bureau of Land Management, an Interior Department agency, held a lease sale for the refuge's coastal plain on January 6, 2021, two weeks before Biden took office. The Biden Administration has granted over 6,700 drilling leases in its first 25 months, giving in to the “we’re still going to need oil for a while” excuse.

We need to see Democrats play hardball against the corrupt Big Oil oligarchs’ messy, dangerous projects. We have read that the Willow MDP alone could cause nearly $20 billion in climate-related damages. Therefore, we support Senator Markey and Senate colleagues who suggested that ”rather than approving the Willow MDP, the Secretary of the Interior has the authority to choose the no-action alternative and initiate a rulemaking proceeding that fully and permanently protects the Nuiqsut region’s designated special areas and meets the ecological and subsistence needs of the people of Nuiqsut.” We hope she chooses that option.

The U.S. has the highest oil consumption in the world with the most available revenue to fast-track cleaner alternatives. Even if we can’t go cold turkey just yet, we must stop building up more dependence. As David Wallace-Wells said, “A drink isn’t a bender, but at some point, if you’re hoping to put alcoholism behind you, you’ve got to actually stop drinking. Or at the very least, stop ordering wine delivered to your door."