Biden Finds No Olive Branches on Alaska’s North Slope in Pending Willow Decision

President Joe Biden is stuck between Alaska’s North Slope and a hard place in pondering his pending decision to deny or endorse Conoco-Phillips’ $8 billion Willow Project, the largest new oil field development proposed in the United States in decades.
Among Biden’s 2020 campaign pledges was “no, no, no more” new oil drilling on federal public lands, a key component in his plan to halve the nation’s carbon emissions by 2030.
But under his administration, federal agencies have defended the massive project’s Trump Era approval in court. After a judge stayed the approval in 2021, it endorsed a scaled-down version that would still be the largest single-project oil extraction on federal lands in the nation’s history….