Why?

"Destroy Everything" seems like the most appropriate Trump slogan.

The Trump administration said on Monday it has officially approved a plan to open a pristine Arctic wildlife refuge in Alaska for oil drilling.

[...]

The plan has been in the works since Congress mandated in its 2017 tax bill that the Interior Department must auction off drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

  Politico

2017, when Republicans were in control.

And why does this make no sense?

A number of major global banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, have said they won’t provide financing for drilling in ANWR.

[...]

Many oil companies have sought access to ANWR for years, but the official decision to open it comes at a time when few in the industry are expected to take a risk on unexplored properties with little data on the oil resources beneath the surface.

[...]

Environmental groups also said tapping the resources from the area will exacerbate climate change in a region that is already seeing a loss of permafrost and, in some cases, villages on the coastline in danger of sliding into the sea.

[...]

Oil companies have been leaving Alaska because of the high cost of drilling and shipping oil from such a remote area compared to the relatively quick and cheap oil wells they can drill in Texas, North Dakota and other states already equipped with pipelines. British oil giant BP last month completed a sale of its extensive Alaska operations to the smaller Hilcorp, and ConocoPhillips remains one of the only major oil companies still drilling in Alaska.

[...]

President Donald Trump, who has previously boasted about opening ANWR, indicated in an interview early Monday that no final decision had been made on opening the area.

"We may or may not do it," he said.

Depends on whether ConocoPhillips' CEO sucks up hard enough.

The future is not in oil energy.

The oil industry was already grappling with the energy transition, copious supply and signs of peak demand as Covid-19 began to spread. The pandemic will likely bring forward that peak and discourage exploration.

[...]

Rather than the next frontier, the project to extract energy risks being added to a list of what companies call “stranded assets” that could cost them huge sums to mothball.

As the coronavirus ravages economies and cripples demand, European oil majors have made some uncomfortable admissions in recent months: oil and gas worth billions of dollars might never be pumped out of the ground.

With the crisis also hastening a global shift to cleaner energy, fossil fuels will likely be cheaper than expected in the coming decades, while emitting the carbon they contain will get more expensive. These two simple assumptions mean that tapping some fields no longer makes economic sense. BP Plc said on Aug. 4 that it would no longer do any exploration in new countries, according to Rystad Energy AS. The consultant expects about 10% of the world’s recoverable oil resources—some 125 billion barrels—to become obsolete.

So, destroy the wildlife refuge for nothing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.