President Trump is unlocking America’s treasure chest. Alaska is open for business, and now in addition to all his other moves, President Trump has opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, for drilling.
Predictably, the legacy media is freaking out.
The Trump administration on Thursday announced a plan to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the United States.
The decision was the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other wildlife.
“Pristine wilderness,” it is, but it’s not the beautiful mountains and great expanses of taiga that one generally sees in news stories about Alaska. It’s a cold tundral plain, for the most part. Yes, there is quite a bit of wildlife there, but there is a lot of oil and gas, too, which our country needs.
This is where we need to embrace the power of “and.”
Speaking of “and,” the administration is building roads, too, as we noted a few weeks ago.
(Secretary of the Interior Doug) Burgum also announced that the Interior Department had finalized a deal that would allow a contentious gravel road to be built through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Alaska. And he reiterated that the agency would greenlight an industrial road that would cut through pristine wilderness to reach a proposed copper and zinc mine in northern Alaska.
Taken together, the decisions “represent a clear and unified message, which is Alaska is open for business,” Mr. Burgum said.
All of this is good news.
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This Is Big: Trump Approves Key Alaska Mining Road
The Ambler Road, which we discussed earlier, will provide ground access to the Ambler Mining Area, which contains deposits of copper, silver, gold, lead, cobalt, and other strategic metals.
Regarding ANWR and the worries of the left, the legacy media and climate scolds (but I repeat myself thrice-over), it’s not nearly as big a deal as some might think. New drilling technologies, such as horizontal drilling, make it possible to reach a vast area with a small footprint. Current estimates for ANWR posit a roughly 2,000-acre footprint, out of the 19 million acres of ANWR. That footprint is about the size of a major big-city airport, and constitutes 0.010 percent of the Refuge’s total area.
Most people in the lower 48 have a hard time grasping how vast Alaska is. I live here and sometimes it amazes me to really think about how big the Great Land is. From the panhandle to the end of the Aleutians is roughly the same distance that separates Boston from San Francisco. Alaska is big enough to drop in the next three largest states: Texas, California, and Montana. Alaska has over 3,000,000 lakes. It has more coastline than the lower 48 states combined. We can have these roads and the oil development, and still have a nearly incomprehensible amount of untouched, wild Alaska for future generations.
This is a case where we literally can have our cake and eat it, too, and President Trump is ready to start serving up some baked goods.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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