Memos drafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identifying outdated vegetation maps and studies of the impact of oil development on caribou, insufficient air quality modeling, and studies of the impacts of the development on Polar bears, could expose the Trump administration to litigation. The memos were hidden from public view until environmentalist published them the day before the comment period ended on the Trump administration’s draft study of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The significance of the USFWS comments are the legal leverage they will provide to environmental groups who have vehemently opposed drilling in ANWR and will not be able to resist the administration’s criticism of it’s own plan to challenge the leasing plan in federal court.
According to Dermat Cole, an Artic Today columnist “It’s ironic that ever since the approval by Congress in late 2017 of oil leasing in ANWR, the biggest threat to oil leasing in ANWR has been the Trump administration. It’s willingness to cut corners to make oil drilling a reality before the next shift in the political winds in Washington, D.C. has come at the expense of the careful analysis required by law.”
Because the Obama administration, did not study the relationship of the issues raised in the comments because there was no chance of oil and gas drilling taking place in ANWR, the lack of such analysis is the primary weakness in the Trump plan.
Yet, the Trump administration has only compounded the potential for legal violations of drilling in ANWR by rushing the drilling proposal through the required rigorous environmental review due to potential threats to water quality and critical habitat, by planning to start auctioning off oil leases within a few months. In record time to assess the complex and potentially irreversible impacts on endangered species including caribou and polar bear, in a recent speech at the annual conference of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, Joe Balash, Interior’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management said the environmental impact statement for ANWR coastal plain leasing drafted by the Bureau of Land Management, will be followed by a final environmental impact statement “by the end of this summer… And once we have a final EIS we’ll be in a position to issue a record of decision and notice of lease sale. And that lease sale will happen in 2019.”
Pointing out that federal agencies typically take much longer than a few months to address public comments on a draft EIS, Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League says that “[i]n the history of environmental reviews, there’s been nothing like this” and that the BLM’s record breaking short timeline for ANWR “They’ll be very vulnerable to legal challenges.