Alaska is our largest state. Disconnected from the continental United States, much of it is pristine and harsh, undeveloped and rugged, empty of humanity but packed with wildlife. It also holds a wonderland of untapped natural resources the federal government has long sought to protect.
Project 2025 will decimate the state of Alaska’s resources for billionaire profit while claiming to help Alaskans “have better jobs” and “make more money.”
Here’s how Project 2025 proposes to pull off this billionaire bait-and-switch.
Of course, Project 2025’s Christo-fascists and their billionaire backers want Alaska’s oil.
Alaska has untapped potential for increased oil production, which is important not just to the revitalization of the nation’s energy sector but is vital to the Alaskan economy. One-quarter of Alaska’s jobs are in the oil industry, and half of its overall economy depends on that industry. Without oil production, the Alaskan economy would be half its size.
Project 2025, page 530
Because profits matter more than people, animals, the environment, our planet, or our futures.
Project 2025 calls for more aggressive drilling than previously proposed.
A new Administration must take the following actions immediately:
Approve the 2020 National Petroleum Reserve Alaska Integrated Activity Plan (NPRA-IAP) by resigning the Record of Decision. (Secretary Haaland’s order reverted to the 2013 IAP, the science for which is out of date, unlike the 2020 IAP.)
Reinstate the 2020 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) by secretarial order and lift the suspension of the leases. l
Approve the 2020 Willow EIS, the largest pending oil and gas projection in the United States in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and expand approval from three to five drilling pads.
Project 2025, page 530
But fossil fuels represent a small fraction of what Project 2025’s Christo-fascists and billionaires envision for their own profit-making. Look at what else they want to pillage.
Minerals. Alaska is not just blessed with an abundance of oil, it has vast untapped mineral potential. Therefore, the new Administration must immedi-ately approve the Ambler Road Project across BLM-managed lands, pursuant to the Secretary’s authority under the ANILCA and based on the Final Envi-ronmental Impact Statement on the project. This will permit construction of a new 211-mile roadway on the south side of the Brooks Range, west from the Dalton Highway to the south bank of the Ambler River, and open the area only to mining-related industrial uses, providing high-paying jobs in an area known for unemployment.
Project 2025, page 530
The robber-barons behind Project 2025 don’t care about high-paying jobs. The people who do this work will make nano-dollars compared to the stratospheric profits billionaires and their Christo-fascist enablers stand to gain from such aggressive extraction.
Let’s take a look at what extraction does to a landscape:
According to March 2024 research published by the Department of Interior, “a 1% increase in mineral extraction correlates with a significant reduction of approximately 0.22% in the green growth.” Should Christo-fascist Republicans win in November, this significant research paper and those with similar findings would be scrubbed from the DOI website.
Copying this re-stack from Sharon L Fullen, because her observations enhance this newsletter:
"There are several different Indigenous peoples across Alaska, even in very remote areas which are resource rich. Alaskan tribes have superseding rights to much of these lands. As with mainland Indigenous tribes, these people would need financial assistance to protect their the land itself and/or access to their land. We must not let these Trump supported corporations strip mine sacred ground, pollute water sources, destroy animal habitantes and build access roads across their land. Many Alaskan tribes fish, hunt, trap and forage for food as their ancestors have done for generations.
Drilling and mining requires lots of employees. Corporations would need to build company towns that create pollution and waste. Much of the land stays frozen for most of the year so construction can be very destructive.
Manifest Destiny “gave”white people the “permission” to take occupied land across America because it was “god’s will”. We must stop this generation of “settlers” from stealing or damaging what is not our government’s right to allow."
Out of sight, out of mind...few people actually get to see Alaska, so it is hard for them to get upset about the decimation of the landscape....but try to put a few renewable energy windmills (or oil derricks) off the vacation/second-home beaches of the east coast, and you will have a full-on conniption.