“I'm just waiting to hear methane explosions like in Russia,” said Mark Springer, a city councilman in Bethel, Alaska. Until recently, he and his wife picked summer berries on a trail through the tundra outside their river town in southwest Alaska, but now that part of the tundra is too dangerous to traverse because water-filled sinkholes have formed with surface layers of volatile methane.
Due to a complex mechanism called “Arctic reinforcements“Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the world as a whole, and the 85% of the state that is permafrost is deteriorating and threatening to release large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.” Greenhouse gas that captures 28 times more heat than CO2.
For the record:
12:21 p.m. December 14, 2024An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Ch'eelil Peter lives in Arctic Village. Her family is from Arctic Village.
A 2023 NASA air spectrometer study found about 2 million “hot spots,” often associated with areas burned by wildfires, emitting more than 3,000 parts per million of methane between the ground and the aircraft – 420 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is what is currently overheating the planet.
Nonetheless, the new Trump administration plans to push Alaska to add even more heat to the planet, while doing so could make it harder to track the impacts. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which are critical to climate studies, monitoring and reporting, are likely to be the focus of cuts and possible elimination over the next four years with the Defense Department's Center for Arctic Security Studies, which addresses the impact of climate on national security.
On November 8th, just three days after the election, Donald Trump released one short social media video In it, he boasted that during his first term he “opened ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) for energy development and worked to reopen the Tongass National Forest as a multi-tiered working forest.”…We will ensure that (federally funded ) Gas pipeline project is being built. … We will maximize Alaska’s mining potential.”
Trump “views Alaska's oil resources, our gas resources, our mining resources, our timber resources … as assets not just for Alaska, but as solutions to the country's problems,” the state's Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, said in a livestream after watching the video had posted. “Many people believe that carbon emissions are driving global warming,” he said told reporters last year, suggesting he doesn't, but he is willing to sell carbon offsets based on the sequestration potential in Alaska's forests that are not logged.
Most Americans would likely oppose high levels of wilderness destruction (and methane emissions) in return for more resource extraction on America's “final frontier,” although many Alaskans and their congressional delegation would support it, claiming it is an economic necessity. Given that 65% of Alaska is public land managed by federal agencies and another 11% is controlled by Alaska Natives under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, the debate will be as much about national issues as the Turning Indigenous Sovereignty.
Expect the Trump administration to reverse oil and gas leasing bans and restrictions put in place by President Biden in ANWR and the North Slope National Petroleum Reserve. Expect the oil lease for ConocoPhillips' Willow project on the reservation, approved last year for 400,000 acres, to increase to 800,000 acres. Also on tap, new oil and gas explorationincluding on 1.6 million hectares near the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
The pipeline promised by Trump is a decades-old attempt to build an 800-mile, $44 billion natural gas connection from Prudhoe Bay (where the temperature hit a record 89 degrees on August 8) to an export terminal Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage (where climate-related wildfires and spruce beetle infestations are already spreading). On November 30th the The Anchorage Daily News editorial team analyzed They assessed the prospects for the pipeline and concluded that the risky project could not be realized, not least because no private partners wanted to participate in it. This analysis did not take into account that the pipeline could triple the state's carbon emissions.
Trump's support is to be expected renewed clear-cutting in the 17 million-acre Tongass Forest, the same ancient carbon sink that Dunleavy wanted to capitalize on; construction of a 211-mile all-industrial road through the pristine Brooks Range to pave the way for copper mining; and allow an open pit gold mine near the headwaters of the The salmon-rich Kuskokwim River. More than 30 Alaska Native villages depend on the Kuskokwim for their livelihood.
It is less clear whether Trump will support a new copper and gold mining project This is being pushed by the Canadian government and could impact salmon runs in southeast Alaska. During his first term, Trump blocked a similar project, the Pebble Mine above Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska, because his eldest son and a wealthy adviser sided with the bay's salmon fisheryn an estimated $2 billion per year. (Pebble Mine developers are suing to try to keep the project alive.)
Ch'eelil Peter, 17, who is Gwich'in and Diné and whose family is from Arctic Village south of ANWR, is party to a lawsuit that seeks to shut down the natural gas pipeline once and for all. At a hearing in October where the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit, she and others of the lawsuit's eight young plaintiffs argued that the pipeline would undermine their state constitutional rights to life, health and access to fish and wildlife.
“It's supposed to be snowing here in Anchorage right now,” Peter said outside the courthouse, “but it's more like fall. … There haven't been any fish in the Yukon (River) for years. … In July we went there with the whole family to the fish camp and stored, got fish and processed it (for the winter). ”
Another plaintiff, Cecily Shavelson, 14, of Homer, Alaska, insisted that she and her colleagues “will keep doing something until something changes.”
Her 12-year-old sister Lila wondered “what the prosecutor was actually thinking.” I wondered if it was her decision to speak against us and our future.”
Alaska is both the most climate-vulnerable state in the country and a veritable climate bomb as its methane begins to melt in the ice. The Biden administration's moderate energy measures in the 49th state satisfied no one. President-elect Trump, Who calls the climate crisis? “One of the greatest fraudsters of all time” could detonate this bomb with his “drill, baby, drill” energy policy.
David Helvarg is executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group, author and co-host of “Rising Tide: The Ocean Podcast.”