No Alaska LNG!
We are calling on the Biden Administration and the Department of Energy to stop violently enabling the climate crisis and to instead reconsider and reverse their decision to approve the export application for the proposed Alaska Liquified Natural Gas Pipeline Project.
On April 13th, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) approved exports from the proposed AK LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) Pipeline Project. With this critical export license approval, the AK LNG Project has the majority of permits it needs to move forward and secure investors. The proposed project would include a 807 mile pipeline that would extend from a new gas treatment plant on the North Slope of Alaska through Inupiaq, Gwich'in, Koyukon, Tanana, Ahtna, and Dena'ina lands down under the Cook Inlet to a massive liquefaction facility and export terminal in Nikiski, Alaska. The Alaska state-owned Alaska Gasline Development Corporation (AGDC) was created by the Alaska Legislature with a mandate to extract and market North Slope gas. Since 2017 they have been the sole agency pushing the proposed AK LNG Project and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the pursuit of this project.
It is clear that the disproportionately high and adverse impacts to subsistence for Alaska Natives was also not taken seriously by the DOE. According to DOE's own recent approval, “[t]he Final SEIS…noted that cumulative impacts from regional projects could result in significant adverse impacts to specific subsistence users in the region, but that 'DOE assumes that the communities ... would use other areas within the region for subsistence activities, away from oil and gas development work.'”
Not only would this infrastructure be harmful to the people, caribou, and 35,474 acres of ecosystems impacted along the pipeline, it would also negatively impact folks within Alaska and outside of Alaska with its lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions estimated to be around 2.7 billion metric tons. Construction of this project is estimated to affect 16,069 acres of land permanently, cross countless streams and wetlands, and produce 10 times more emissions than the Willow Project. In greenlighting this project, the Willow project, and other fossil fuel projects, Biden is breaking his campaign promises and is setting us up to be locked into fossil fuels long past when we need to have transitioned to renewable energy. The proposed AK LNG project will only increase the climate crisis we are currently living through and people are dying from.
Liquid Natural Gas is a fossil fuel that has been greenwashed by many companies and utilities as a “green stepping stone” to renewables, but costly and permanent fossil fuel infrastructure is not a stepping stone. We know that the way forward is to justly transition our energy grids and labor force to renewable energy while keeping fossil fuels in the ground and decommissioning fossil fuel infrastructure. The money needed for this proposed pipeline should instead be used to do that.
