After U.S. forces captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump bluntly told reporters he wanted U.S. oil companies to make heavy investments there, saying “We’re going to be taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”
Something that’s normally subtext became an unvarnished acknowledgement: federal policy consistently puts oil corporations first. Even when it makes no sense for anyone, including the oil corporations. For another example, look no farther than the Trump administration’s handling of oil and gas leases in Alaska.
This summer’s Big Beautiful Bill mandated controversial new oil and gas sales in both the Arctic and the federal waters of Cook Inlet. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) also scrapped a Biden-era offshore management plan that had protected Alaskan coastal waters from leasing. Now the agency plans 21 offshore leases around the state, from the Gulf of Alaska to a newly created High Arctic region.
In Southcentral alone, Cook Inlet faces six leases required by the budget bill, as well as five additional offshore leases in BOEM’s new federal 5-year plan. This abrupt U-turn is pure politics, and doesn’t benefit Alaskans. Any offshore oil and gas development here opens the door to future disaster: Our communities remember the devastation of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and more recently, have watched Cook Inlet’s aging gas infrastructure leak and spill.
Chances for Alaskans to be a meaningful part of decisions about our land and water are becoming fewer. The leases in the Big Beautiful Bill are already scheduled to begin in March without public comment, and there is only a short window to share public input on the offshore 5-year plan, open until January 23rd.
Alaskans have long opposed offshore drilling, whether that’s protecting the Kenai Peninsula’s Kachemak Bay or the Chukchi Sea. Multiple presidents recognized the importance of our commercial and subsistence fisheries — and the threat oil and gas poses to them — and enacted moratoriums on offshore development. Now, this slew of planned leases is an impending threat to coastal ecosystems, undermining Alaska’s urgent need to embrace the real promise of renewables.
Past attempts at offshore drilling in federal waters off Alaska’s coast set a troubling precedent of failure. In Upper Cook Inlet, Hilcorp is the primary operator of nearshore gas platforms in state waters, and has racked up a terrible track record of environmental and regulatory violations. In 2015, state regulators wrote, “The disregard for regulatory compliance is endemic to Hilcorp’s approach to its Alaska operations,” adding, “Hilcorp’s conduct is inexcusable.” The company has been fined 20 times, including a $700,000 penalty in November. Hilcorp’s persistent bad behavior shows these fines are merely a cost of its corner-cutting business model.
Hilcorp was the only bidder in Cook Inlet during the mandated Lease Sale 258 in 2022, illustrating both the lack of wider interest in the region and the likelihood of bad consequences if the company takes on offshore development in Lower Cook Inlet. Official estimates found a 1-in-5 chance of at least one major spills. There’s too much at stake in that bet. By removing these leases from the 11th OCS 5-year plan, we can protect the small population of critically endangered Cook Inlet belugas, our commercial, sport, and subsistence fisheries, and the Kenai Peninsula’s thriving outdoor-oriented tourism.
Layered on top of Washington’s short-sighted push for fossil fuels and its undermining of renewables is a particularly Alaskan dose of absurdity. A glaring loophole in the state’s corporate income tax allows Hilcorp to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars — even as schools close for lack of funding. Hilcorp insists that paying the same taxes as other oil majors would force it to pull back investment in the state, a claim Alaskans are asked to accept while public services are cut.
Paradoxically, at President Trump’s recent assembly of oil executives, Hilcorp’s owner Jeffery Hildebrand said they’re ready to invest in Venezuela, even as larger firms voiced skepticism about the soaring costs. It’s performances like this that make it clear that oil and gas policy is not written for the public so much as the people who profit from it.
Alaskans are already living with the impacts of a warming climate, in big and small ways. Doubling down on unfettered oil and gas extraction is not a solution to those challenges. A fair transition to renewable energy — solar, wind, and geothermal — will take time, but Alaska is rich in these resources, and they are rapidly growing cheaper and more reliable. Instead of investing in that future, the Trump administration has chosen to accelerate the same extractive projects Alaskans have resisted for decades.