Northern Bering Sea protected from oil and gas development

On Monday, President Joe Biden announced the withdrawal of 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea from federal oil and gas leasing.
Using a section of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, Biden issued memoranda to withdraw portions of the outer continental shelf from future oil and natural gas leasing, including the entire U.S. Pacific and Eastern Atlantic coasts, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and the remainder of the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area that was still open to leasing. The withdrawal areas encompass more than 625 million acres and represent the largest withdrawal in U.S. history, the Dept. of Interior said in a press release.  Biden Administration had “determined that the environmental and economic risks and harms that would result from drilling in these areas outweigh their limited fossil fuel resource potential,” according to a statement from the White House.
The statement added that the region includes “one of the largest marine mammal migrations in the world” and that there are no existing oil and gas leases in the exempted area.
“This is an area where oil and gas development would pose severe dangers to coastal communities, and where the health of these waters is critically important to food security and to the culture of more than 70 coastal Tribes, including the Yup’ik, Cup’ik, and Inupiaq people who have relied on these resources for millennia,” said the White House statement.
In 2016, then-President Barack Obama created the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area and within that area withdrew from oil and gas leasing areas from the Bering Strait to Kotlik and out to the International Date Line, waters around St. Lawrence Island, excluding Norton Bay. Now, the entire Northern Bering Sea, from Kuskokwim Bay to just south of Kotzebue Sound, will see the same protections.
Biden’s executive order represents a win for regional advocates, decades in the making. Tribes in the region have opposed offshore oil and gas activities since the 1980s. The Dept. of Interior maintains that oil and gas industry activity in the newly withdrawn areas has been very low, historically. There is no active oil and gas exploration and development along the eastern U.S. Atlantic or in the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area.
“With these withdrawals, President Biden is protecting coastal communities, marine ecosystems, and local economies – including fishing, recreation, and tourism – from oil spills and other impacts of offshore drilling,” said a statement from the White House.
“The Northern Bering Sea area has been home to our ancestors for thousands of years, and it will be home to our descendants for thousands of years to come,” said Kawerak in a joint statement with Association of Village Council Presidents, and Bering Sea Elders Group.  “In this remote and threatened part of the world, we strive to live in balance with each other and our environment and the fish, birds, and marine mammals that sustain us. Climate change and growing industrial activities threaten our traditional lands and waters and the resources we have stewarded for generations.”
“We thank President Biden for issuing these withdraws and honoring over 40 years of tribal advocacy to protect our food security and marine environment from oil and gas leasing. Tribes are the original stewards of the Northern Bering Sea. We depend on a healthy ocean, and we appreciate President Biden for partnering in this stewardship to protect our waters.” said Mary David, Executive Vice President, Kawerak, Inc.
 Tribal leaders have protested for decades that drilling would impact subsistence in numerous ways by disrupting marine mammal migration routes, adding to already increasing ship traffic, and increasing the risk of oil spills.
“Our traditional waters of the Bering Sea are interconnected, and protecting these waters helps ensure our food sovereignty, our cultural, economic, physical and traditional existence, and our very survival,” said Jaylene Wheeler, Executive Director of the Bering Sea Elders Group.
The Biden administration noted that “the withdrawals have no expiration date and prohibit all future oil and natural gas leasing in the areas withdrawn.”
Oil and gas exploration in the Northern Bering Sea in the early 1980s did not result in meaningful discoveries.

Playing Politics
The Alaska Congressional Delegation did not respond favorably to Biden’s decision.
Nick Begich III, the freshman in Congress, lashed out on the social media platform X and called President Biden a “son of a bitch.” Begich falsely stated that the measure would include Cook Inlet and its gas production, which it does not.
Senator Lisa Murkowski posted a more nuanced statement, also on X, saying that she has long agreed that not all offshore areas need to be available for development at all times, and that some areas merit more permanent protections. “I also understand the desire of Alaska Tribes in the Bering Straits region to prevent any oil and gas development in their nearby waters, as unlikely as that may be,” she wrote. However, she objected that the federal government takes more and more federal oil and gas leases off the table for Alaska “while nothing is done to promote development.”  
She also took issue with the “manner in which this announcement was made—post-election, at the 11th hour, and unilaterally through executive action.”
When Trump unilaterally revoked protections in 2017, she was fine with the process. In stark contrast to the local outcry back then and that Alaskan voices were silenced through Trump’s EO, she said, “When President Trump took office, he promised to listen to the people and return power to them, and today he and Secretary Zinke delivered for Alaskans.”
According to KTUU, Sen. Dan Sullivan stated on Monday that he has never advocated for resource development in the Bering Sea area, as there is limited resource potential in that region. He also took issue that Biden made this broad, sweeping move in a unilateral process. Sullivan said the Biden administration did not consult Alaska’s congressional delegation before announcing it.
President-elect Donald Trump’s Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called the plan “disgraceful.”
“Joe Biden clearly wants high gas prices to be his legacy,” Leavitt wrote in an email to Bloomberg News. “Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.” The Bloomberg story and the email both came out before Biden’s decision was official.
Trump, in his first presidency, signed an executive order in May 2017 that rolled back not only outer continental shelf oil and gas development restrictions in the Arctic, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, but also revoked the Northern Bering Sea Climate Change Resilience strategy put into place by Obama in December 2016. Trump’s executive order was challenged – and later found to be illegal. In 2019, federal Judge Sharon Gleason said it would take an act of Congress to reverse Obama’s decision. The case was handed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. When Biden reinstated the withdrawals and the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area, the court deemed the lawsuit moot.
During Trump’s attempt to undo the protections, Kawerak President Melanie Bahnke wrote a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. “The risks of oil and gas activities to our well-being, way of life and environment are not outweighed by benefits that companies might obtain or offer to us,” she wrote.

With reporting by Diana Haecker