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Arctic Offshore Drilling Project Rejection Is Good News For Polar Bears

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  • Foggy Island Bay is a rich biodiverse environment for threatened and endangered animals including polar bears.
  • Hillcorp Alaska’s Liberty oil project omitted to inform the court of carbon emission from drillings impacting the environment.
  • The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit has rejected the Liberty oil project.

In 2018, the Trump administration gave approval to Hillcorp Alaska’s Liberty oil project in Foggy Island Bay.  Lawsuits from environmental groups immediately followed its approval.  And last December 7, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the arctic offshore drilling project.

In a statement following the decision, EarthJustice attorney Jeremy Lieb from the Center for Biological Diversity said, “I’m pleased that the court today rejected the administration’s inaccurate and misleading analysis of this project’s impact to the climate.”

He added, “In the face of a worsening climate crisis, the federal government should not be in the business of approving irresponsible offshore oil development in the Arctic.”

Photo Credit: Hans-Jurgen Mager (Unsplash)

Foggy Island Bay is home to precious threatened and endangered marine mammals, that includes six species of whales, polar bears, sea lions, three species of seals, sea otters, and Pacific walruses. Around the shallow waters of the bay, seabirds, numerous species of fish, and larger mammals also find sanctuary.

The construction of the project would engage the Endangered Species Act protections as some of these animals like the polar bears are listed as a ‘vulnerable’ species. It also failed to mention how much carbon emissions it would contribute to the atmosphere through oil extraction.

The court ruled that this omission of foreign oil emissions estimates, failure of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to adequately measure the risks to the endangered polar bears, and poor-quality modeling including unproven assumptions, was enough to reject the project.

Photo Credit: Hans-Jurgen Mager (Unsplash)

Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska program director at Defenders of Wildlife, which also filed a lawsuit said, “Today’s news is a victory for Alaska’s imperiled polar bears that are threatened by oil and gas development throughout virtually all of their terrestrial denning critical habitat—in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and in the nearshore marine environment, as well.”

This is a victory for the rich biodiverse population of the Foggy Island Bay, the polar bear protectors, the seals, whales, birds, and the environment. 

Source: Good News Network

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