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.

The most lawless administration in history strikes again

Interior withheld 253 pages of records they were required to produce under a court order in the suit shortly after now Secretary David Bernhardt was nominated to his post.

“Hubbel Relat (who is now the DOI deputy solicitor but at the time was the DOI’s counselor to the Secretary) directed Office of the Solicitor (SOL) attorney-advisors supporting the FOIA litigation to withhold any documents that were sent to or from Bernhardt, or that referenced him in any way, from upcoming FOIA releases related to the litigation,” the report states.

The documents were released several months after Bernhardt was confirmed.

[...]

"Officials at Interior are now on the record admitting what we suspected all along: they orchestrated a coverup to protect Secretary Bernhardt during his confirmation, and all but lied to Congress about it."

[...]

[Interior Solicitor Daniel] Jorjani told OIG investigators that as the DOI’s top attorney, he owned the decision for withholding the documents, not Relat.

“Knowing Hubbel [Relat] and his absolute focus on compliance and squaring every corner, he probably wanted to make sure that everything he was doing was fully compliant.” Jorjani told OIG, adding, “Either I came up with the idea — and I would like to think I’m smart enough to do that — or Hubbel [Relat], being proactive, said, ‘Oh, can we do this compliantly and consistent with the court’s direction,’ and then ran it past me. . . . It would be one of those two, I would think.”

  The Hill

He doesn't know which of those two things happened? Or even if one of them did? Sure, pal.

You remember Bernhardt - the guy who's stealing Native American lands.

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

Jesus Christ, it's going to be too late by November

The Bureau of Indian Affairs told the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe on Friday that their reservation will be "disestablished" and their land taken out of trust, per an order from the Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, tribe Chairman Cedric Cromwell announced in a post on the tribe's website.

"Today's action was cruel and it was unnecessary. The Secretary is under no court order to take our land out of trust. He is fully aware that litigation to uphold our status as a tribe eligible for the benefits of the Indian Reorganization Act is ongoing," Cromwell wrote. "It begs the question, what is driving our federal trustee's crusade against our reservation?"

[...]

Jean-Luc Pierite, head of the North American Indian Center of Boston, called the move an existential crisis for all tribes federally recognized after 1934. The move without a court order signals that reservations across the United States could be taken out of trust at the discretion of the secretary of the interior, Pierite said.

[...]

Pierite said the interior secretary's move is based on the 2009 Supreme Court ruling Carcieri v. Salazar, which established that the federal government cannot take land into trust for tribes that weren't "under federal jurisdiction" in the year 1934.

Conner Swanson, a spokesperson from the Department of the Interior, said the tribe remains federally recognized, and that there was a court decision mandating the department's action.

[...]

Cromwell said that no court mandate had been issued that told the Department of the Interior to take the land out of trust.

"We know that Congress is the only group that has a plenary authority to do that. So the court did not issue a mandate," Cromwell said. "So this is very nefarious activity by the [interior secretary]."

  WBUR

Why are they doing this now, for fuck's sake? Because everybody is distracted with the virus and can only fight one crisis at a time? What else are they doing while we're occupied?*

Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, who represents the South Shore, South Coast, Cape and Islands and who reintroduced the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act to provide the tribe with federal recognition, called the interior secretary's action "one of the most cruel and nonsensical acts I have seen since coming to Congress."

The cruelty is the point with this administration.

"This also calls out the need for the Senate to act on the dual bipartisan proposals led by myself and [Oklahoma U.S. Rep. Tom Cole], which would rectify this issue."

Not with Mitch McConnell at the helm they won't.

The House was originally supposed to vote on the bill in early May 2019, until a critical tweet by President Trump led its sponsors to pull it from the House floor. The bill eventually passed with a vote of 275-146. Almost all Democrats voted for it, and most Republicans voted against it.

November is going to be too late. He has to go now. His treatment of states whose governors he doesn't like and his complete failure in the response to the pandemic are reason enough to impeach the motherfucker again. Sadly, we still have the same fuckers controlling the Senate.

Cromwell said that the Trump administration has been actively working against the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.

[...]

"My tribe [is] just gonna continue to fight for our land, including going through proper channels like the courts. This isn't the end for us," Cromwell said.

In his statement, Cromwell affirmed the tribe's commitment to survival despite adversity.

"We have survived, we will continue to survive," he wrote. "These are our lands, these are the lands of our ancestors, and these will be the lands of our grandchildren. This Administration has come and it will go. But we will be here, always. And we will not rest until we are treated equally with other federally recognized tribes and the status of our reservation is confirmed."

This administration is not going to go fast enough.

*UPDATE:  Here are a couple things.