Interior’s fist pumping lease sale and Big Oil’s gluttonous ride—Alaska News Brief April 2026
The Interior Department held a lease sale last month that offered a huge swath of the western Arctic to bidders. The agency’s press release touted it as a great success with oil and gas companies bidding on over 1.3 million acres of public land, with record revenue for a lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Sun sets on Teshekpuk Lake. Photo by Gerrit Vyn, Cornell Lab.
What the agency doesn’t mention is that the law requires that it take measures to mitigate and minimize harm to these public lands and that Interior ignored those mandates; that the revenue from this sale is a pittance for oil giants, maybe a day’s profit and mere pocket change wagered against the immeasurable value of Arctic health; that the United States already produces record amounts of oil and gas and doesn’t need more; and that any oil production from these leases likely wouldn’t come until the next decade at the earliest and will do nothing about the high cost of gas caused by Trump’s war.
The touted revenue number looks big to most of us, but it’s chump change for these oil corporations. More to the point, this administration’s fist-pumping over the lease sale is another misinformation campaign to make the actual cost of exploitation invisible.
Coastal erosion in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area. Photo by Brandt Meixell, USGS
Rest assured that this administration’s wildly archaic and destructive fossil fuel agenda will exact enormous costs, and we’ll be the ones paying them. We will pay through the loss of healthy public lands. We will pay through increasingly catastrophic flooding, extreme storms, wildfires, fish die-offs, and other unsustainable crises caused by carbon pollution. We will pay with the degradation of public health caused by pollution and with the exacerbated cost to all of us of an absurdly unaffordable and inadequate healthcare system.
The community of Nuiqsut on the North Slope already grapples with public health impacts caused by the oil rigs surrounding them. None of those costs get factored into the price of selling off public lands.
In fact, some of the areas offered in this recent sale are within a conservation right-of-way granted to the community of Nuiqsut to help address the harmful impacts of the Willow oil and gas project. That right-of-way encompasses an area around Teshekpuk Lake that was set aside to protect caribou and subsistence for the community and was supposed to give the community the right to say “no” to oil in their backyard. The administration terminated the right-of-way before the recent lease sale. In litigation challenging the administration’s unilateral termination of that contract, the court granted a preliminary injunction keeping that right-of-way in place—meaning, those tracts should never have been offered in that lease sale at all.
Teshekpuk caribou in the NPRA. Photo by Bob Wick, BLM
Interior included those areas anyway. What a display of disrespect to the law and to Alaska communities. Leases in those areas should not be finalized, of course, but Interior’s self-congratulatory press release includes them in their revenue figures anyway.
What’s more, the March lease sale said loud and clear that the fossil fuel industry—which lied for over five decades about the known impacts of carbon pollution—bid on lands in decades-long protected areas like Teshekpuk Lake, one of the most important areas in the Arctic because of its importance to shorebirds, migratory waterfowl, and the Teshekpuk Lake caribou herd.
Clearly, no place is off limits to oil corporations if there’s money to be made, especially when Interior opens areas previously protected and eviscerates crucial protection measures along the way. There are no checks or balances when the administration ignores the law and the reasoning around protections, and oil companies go along for the ride and the profit.
Even Exxon and Shell got back into bidding on Arctic Alaska leases, and why? Because they believe there is money to be made, and this administration has laid out the red carpet. It’s horrible, but not surprising that Big Oil (and big money) across the country continue to try to undermine any method of accountability to the communities those companies harm, including by trying to stop folks from suing.
It’s heartbreaking and deeply telling, too, that no place is sacred to the fossil fuel industry and their political allies.
Case in point: During the March lease sale, ConocoPhillips re-bid on the very leases it volunteered to relinquish when permits for the massive Willow oil and gas hub were authorized, and it agreed to keep the footprint of the project smaller. One minute the company agrees to keep those places off the table to offset its harms, and the next it gobbles up the same leases.
Tundra polygons in the Western Arctic. Photo by Gerrit Vyn, Cornell Lab.
Let’s be clear. Oil companies and their executives do not have a business mandate, nor have they adopted a moral or civic position, to prioritize the health of communities and the environment. They care about the next billion dollars in their balance sheets. They care about marketing campaigns that sweep the health impacts, costs, and destruction of their projects under the rug.
The March lease sale and the ones planned after it will do nothing for our everyday energy needs now but will likely funnel more profits into the same suit pockets while taking us further away from a better, more affordable, and more sustainable future.
All of this should not deflate us but enrage and galvanize us. It’s clear that this administration and the oil companies that seek to benefit from its reckless policies will not prioritize our health and future over their profits and short-term gains.
It’s up to us to remain grounded in a vision of a healthy and sustainable Alaska that props up diverse economic sectors. It’s up to us to demand a healthy environment for everyone. It’s up to us to heed the wisdom of those who came before us and fought for clean water and air, who rallied to protect land and water for everyone, and who did so when facing powerful forces driven by money interests.
The western Arctic. Photo by Florian Schulz. Courtesy of www.protectthearctic.org.
Our strength is in looking ahead with the understanding that what we do now, how we stay engaged, and the intensity and relentlessness with which we demand a future that sustains our communities and Earth is where we hold power.
Trustees filed a lawsuit before the March lease sale that challenges Interior’s complete disregard for protections in designated Special Areas when it adopted the leasing plan that led to the latest lease sale. More work lies ahead. Congress has mandated four more lease sales in the western Arctic by 2035, and Interior will announce a lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge soon.
We need to be seen and heard in boardrooms, congressional offices, our communities, and in court. We need to shout out what this administration and its oil beneficiaries want to keep silent—that this careless agenda to auction off public land to industrial exploitation is a theft of our health, our home, and our future.
Those are the costs Trustees won’t accept, and we hope you don’t either.
PS. Thanks to supporters like you, we can continue fighting to protect Alaska’s land, water, air, wildlife and people.
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