Alaska and Trump: Drilling for oil in a wildlife refuge
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While attention was pointed towards the storming of the Capitol, over four thousand miles away in north-eastern Alaska, an auction was held to sell the right to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Alaska sits above billions of barrels of oil, but it's also a haven to an array of species and wildlife. What lies behind this controversial decision to allow drilling to go forward?
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Guest:
Amy Martin - Reporter and founder of the 'Threshold' podcast.
Host: David Aaronovitch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the story of a finite presidency and a seemingly infinite space. |
| 0:07.0 | It's like an ocean of grass and it's incredibly quiet and it feels safe and just feels |
| 0:20.5 | like another world |
| 0:28.0 | On January the 6th, while supporters of the defeated president stormed the capital in Washington. 4,000 miles away in Alaska, an auction was held to sell the right to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife |
| 0:36.7 | Refuge. |
| 0:37.7 | Today we are following Congress's direction and fulfilling that commitment to the nation and to Alaskans to develop a |
| 0:44.5 | responsible oil and gas leasing program. But to preserve the environment, such |
| 0:48.9 | drilling had been banned for years. Then came Donald Trump. So what lies behind the decision to allow it and |
| 0:57.6 | what effects might it have? You're listening to stories of our times from the Times and the |
| 1:02.0 | Sunday Times. |
| 1:03.0 | I'm David Aromovich. Today, Alaska and the legacy of Trump, drilling for oil in a wildlife refuge. Those are the sounds of Alaska's far northeastern region, home to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or Anwar, a federal protected area since 1960 and |
| 1:36.7 | one of the United States most remote regions. |
| 1:40.1 | No roads run here, but the reindeer do and the bears lumber, all three types of North American |
| 1:46.2 | bear, black, brown and polar. But underneath the Caribou and the Arctic foxes |
| 1:52.6 | was a huge deposit of oil. |
| 1:55.8 | By some estimates up to 10 billion barrels, |
| 1:59.2 | the extraction of which would mean jobs for the local population and money for the state of Alaska. |
| 2:05.0 | But at what cost, meet my guide to the far north. |
| 2:10.0 | My name is Amy Martin and I'm a reporter and about five years ago I founded a |
| 2:16.3 | podcast and radio show called Threshold and we take one complicated environmental |
| 2:22.1 | issue and we look at it in depth this most recent |
| 2:25.0 | season we explored the big decades-long controversy over drilling for oil in the Arctic |
... |
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