The Alaska Oil Project Will Be Obsolete Before It’s Finished
If the world turned off the tap of fossil fuels tomorrow, all hell would break loose. Something like 30 percent of global electricity and 9 percent of transport would still be running; billions of people would be stuck at home in the dark.
That’s why, even though world leaders now talk constantly about transitioning away from fossil fuels, they also fret about ensuring a supply of oil and gas for next week, next month, and next year. But right now they are also green-lighting new fossil-fuel projects that won’t start producing energy for years and won’t wind down operations for decades.
It is in this context that the Biden administration has just approved a highly contested proposal to drill for oil on federal land in northern Alaska. The project, called Willow, would damage the complex local tundra ecosystem and, on further drilling on- and offshore in the area, as if to say that Willow will be the last major extraction project in the Alaskan Arctic—one last big score, to propel us across the energy gap.
