The GOP’s tax bill passed through Congress this week and President Trump is expected to sign it into law before the year is out. In this Q&A, Stanford Law Professor Deborah Sivas discussed the environmental implications of several provisions in the bill.

Included in the GOP’s tax bill is a provision that will open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration and drilling. First, why is ANWR protected?

ANWR is a place of spectacular wilderness and biodiversity, unlike anywhere else in the U.S.  It supports polar bears, a species now teetering on the brink of extinction, as well as grizzly (brown) and black bears, over 200 species of birds, huge caribou herds, and much more incredible wildlife.  It is one of the last truly wild places left on Earth, largely untouched by human activity.  And it is incredibly fragile.  Oil-related drill rigs, roads, and other infrastructure, not to mention the potentially catastrophic impacts from oil spills, pose significant risks to the ANWR ecosystem.

It is for these reasons that the Secretary of the Interior set aside nearly 9 million acres and withdrew the area from leasing, including oil and gas leasing, in 1960.  Then in 1980, Congress enacted and President Carter signed a law that expanded the protected area to 19.3 million acres and renamed it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  That law mandated further assessment of oil and gas development on the 1.5-million-acre coastal plan and required congressional approval for any drilling.  Another 8 million acres was designated as wilderness.  That was the compromise struck nearly four decades ago, and since then many environmental groups and indigenous people have fought to protect the coastal plain area from oil and gas development.

What might oil drilling mean to the environment? What are the objections to drilling from environmentalists?

There have been several attempts to open up the coastal plain to oil and gas development, including toward the end of the Reagan administration.  But in 1989, we had the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, which demonstrated how much damage can be done by an oil spill and how hard it is to clean up such an incident.  For example, hundreds of thousands of birds were covered by oil and died.  The responsive cleanup efforts, which involved scouring rocks with high pressure hot water, created their own damage to the flora and fauna, with long-lasting impacts.  And as a nation, we saw how unprepared the industry was to deal with an accident and how hard it is to get cleanup personnel and equipment into Alaska.  ANWR is even more remote and more fragile than where the Exxon Valdez ran aground.  A major oil spill there could permanently damage the ecosystem, creating harm that could last literally for many decades.