A letter imploring you to stop the 21st Century Carbon Atomic Bomb
Dear President Biden,
As a first time voter, I was excited by your candidacy. I felt seen — you were someone who finally prioritized issues important to me. I just began my college journey and vividly recall being nestled on the couch in my childhood home, hopeful about the campaign promises emanating from the television screen.
“Climate change is the existential threat to humanity,” you said. “Unchecked, it is going to bake this planet. This is not hyperbole. It’s real. And we have a moral obligation.”
However, over two years into your presidency, you are egregiously violating your supporters' trust and contradicting the commitments you made to the American people.
Last week, your administration gave the green light for the Willow Master Development Plan in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A).
I urge you to re-evaluate this decision and truly consider the devastating implications. Using your language, this project will be the ‘straw that broke the camel's back’ for the climate crisis.
The oil drilling project, developed in 2020 with ConocoPhillips Oil Company, is an $8 billion proposal to drill on over 23 million acres of undisturbed land in Alaska.
Willow is the largest proposed oil project on U.S. land — a slap in the face to your promises to “retire government fossil fuel programs and clear the way for clean energy.”
According to ConocoPhillips’ proposal, the project would create 18,000 barrels of oil a day. The U.S. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) estimates Willow would generate more than 614 million barrels of oil over the next 30 years, bringing in $17 billion in revenue for federal, state, and local governments.
Willow infrastructure includes the construction of hundreds of miles of pipelines and roads, gravel mines, and processing facilities smack dab in the middle of the pristine Arctic tundras.
The world cannot afford a half century-long investment into fossil fuels. Your approval on the basis of the BLM impact report, is a negligent miscalculation of the true impact of Willow. Your administration and the report have failed to account for the high risk of disaster and the ripple effect of environmental damage in store.
Your Administration’s groundbreaking Inflation Reduction Act plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. These are empty promises. Willow oil use, in contradiction, locks us in 263 million tons of greenhouse gas.
263 million tons, in more digestible terms, is the equivalent of emission of 76 coal power plants. This represents more than a third of coal plants in the U.S..
Your emission goals are simply incongruent with the initiatives your administration has undertaken. It’s time to put your money where your mouth is and invest in renewable infrastructure, not dirty oil.
Locking into 30 years of fossil dependency is counterintuitive and downright irrational when put side-by-side with your directives to overhaul fossil fuel programs.
The current BLM projections are already devastating towards hope for climate mitigation. However, it doesn’t even scratch the surface of implications.
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BLM fails to consider the risk of disaster and spills that are likely as a result of changing climate and temperatures. According to temperature data published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the Arctic is warming, on average, more than four times faster than the rest of the world.
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This is significant to the infrastructure of the Willow Project which will be constructed on melting permafrost. 80 percent of Alaska sits on permafrost: ground made of soil, ice and rocks. With such intense warming, the ground shifts and sinks as the ice in the permafrost melts.
Willow Project infrastructure, from drilling pads to roads, is to be built upon and dependent on the cold and ice to adequately function. Rising temperatures and climate change will destabilize pipelines and drilling infrastructure — resulting in disasters and spills.
Further, when the Arctic permafrost melts, it will release hundreds of billions of tonnes of methane and carbon dioxide, currently dormant in the form of frozen organic matter. This process would be exacerbated by the emissions from Willow considering the sensitivity of this region to warming. And yet, these catastrophic costs are excluded from the impact report.
The impact report also neglects the impact on Native Alaskan communities such as Nuiqsut — approximately 36 miles from the development sites.
An indigenous grassroots organization, Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, points out the clear inequality unfolding under this project, asserting that “while out-of-state executives take in record profits, local residents are left to contend with the detrimental impacts of being surrounded by massive drilling operations.”
The organization highlights that once operating, people will be forced to breathe polluted air and drink polluted water.
It’s not lost on me that we are still dependent on fossil fuels. From your perspective, I understand that the inflated gas and oil prices, as well as the global energy crisis, put pressure on your administration to provide national and energy security.
Not only are we still dependent on fossil fuels, but we are dependent on foreign imports of oil. Lobbyists and supporters of Willow highlight that domestic energy sources are critical to limit our reliance on foreign oil suppliers. Dependence on volatile or authoritarian countries, such as Russia and some OPEC nations, is a definite problem for U.S. stability and global power.
However, these benefits are chump change when looking at costs of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — our not-too-distant future if we invest in long-term fossil fuel infrastructure. At 1.5 degrees, the UN Climate Science report found that costs of climate change would cost $2 trillion annually for the United States.
I understand we still need dependable domestic energy. Instead, I implore you to commit to America’s clean energy potential, reject oil lobbyism, and devote your administration to implementing the ‘Build Back Better’ plan. Dive head first into the plan (you’ve literally already created) under the Inflation Reduction Act.
As president, you still have the most ambitious and proactive climate agenda. Succeeding Trump, it was not an easy feat to clean up his enormous mess of rollbacks and overhaul of existing systems. Do not let this mistake tarnish your reputation as president. Stick to your word and invest in future generations, not the pockets of ConocoPhillips Executives.
Kindly,
Jenna Dahlin