The Biden administration has clearly given up any pretense of being interested in preserving America’s energy independence in the face of a weakening power grid that promises rolling blackouts to come for parts of the country in the near future. That was made clear yesterday when Biden’s Interior Department announced that it was canceling all oil and gas drilling leases approved for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. The leases had been previously issued under the Trump administration and had been approved by Congress in a 2017 bill. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland claims that a new review of the environmental impact study conducted for the leases was “seriously flawed,” giving her the authority to cancel them. (Reuters)

The U.S. Interior Department on Wednesday said it would cancel oil and gas leases in a federal wildlife refuge that were bought by an Alaska state development agency in the final days of former President Donald Trump’s term.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has pledged to protect the 19.6 million-acre (7.9 million-hectare) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for polar bears and caribou.

“As the climate crisis warms the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, we have a responsibility to protect this treasured region for all ages,” he said in a statement.

As usual, when one of Joe Biden’s appointees gets up to something controversial, it’s worth keeping their background in mind and Deb Haaland is no exception. She’s supposedly taking responsibility for a major decision that has both environmental and energy industry implications. But she’s an English major with a law degree who went on to become a career politician after operating a small salsa company. She has no background in environmental studies or fossil fuel energy development. And yet she somehow determined that the ANWR environmental study was “seriously flawed.”

To be sure, there are environmental groups praising this decision, despite its dubious legal nature. But many others are declaring it a disaster in its own right for Alaska. Power The Future Founder and Executive Director Daniel Turner issued the following statement:

“This is another nail in the coffin of the White House lie that Joe Biden isn’t standing in the way of American energy production. As families are dealing with rising gas prices, President Biden is working to ensure his radical green agenda comes first. During his short time in office, Joe Biden has delivered massive inflation and the highest gas prices ever: that will be the legacy of Bidenomics.”

Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan described a “palpable anger” among some of his constituents. He framed the debate as an issue of states’ rights, saying that the Biden administration is conducting an “assault on our economy and our ability to lawfully access our lands.” The local indigenous tribes seem to be split on the issue, with some being opposed to drilling because of threats to the local wildlife while others support the project as a way to generate good-paying jobs for their members.

In the meantime, we continue to sit on an ocean of oil that could meet our energy needs through the end of the century. And yet we’re buying oil from adversarial nations and failing to meet our own energy production requirements. It’s all madness and it needs to end.