Brian Lair on WNYC now our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday

all this year on the show. A piece of big climate news in the last week is President Biden's

decision to cancel seven oil drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge leases

that were sold during the Trump administration. But an article published by Vox this week begins

with the line that the Biden administration can't make a move in the Arctic without a political

mess. This cancellation infuriates the oil companies, as you might imagine, a decision this year to

approve some drilling there raised the eye of environmentalists. So let's take a closer look.

We'll touch on another piece of climate news too, a UN report that says the 2015 Paris climate

Accords are not producing enough change to meet its goals, even though almost every country in the

world signed on. With us now, Rebecca Lieber, who wrote that Arctic story and covered the UN's

Paris Accords assessment and covers climate change generally for Vox. Rebecca, thanks for coming

on. Welcome to WNYC. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's start in the Arctic and let's start with

a background question. When we talk about the Arctic, where are we actually talking about geographically?

Yeah, it's a great question. Well, we're talking for these purposes, the Alaskan Arctic, so

Northern Alaska, the North Slope, which contains two really important pieces of land. One is called

the National Petroleum Reserve, and the other is called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

How are they different? Well, only what the names imply, these are both really important

regions for wildlife conservation as well as to indigenous communities, and the National

Petroleum Reserve has a slightly different history, though, where it is open to oil development.

That doesn't mean it's all open for oil. This is where the controversy has been over how much land

would be protected. And then when we talk about the Arctic refuge, we are talking about really

pristine lands that have never been open to fossil fuel development, despite the oil industry

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