November, 15 2020, 11:00pm EDT
Earthjustice Responds to Trump Administration's Rushed "Call for Nominations" in Arctic Refuge
Trump administration invites oil industry to gear up for drilling in sacred wildlife refuge.
WASHINGTON
Amid a growing public-health crisis, and at a time when oil prices are hitting extreme lows, the lame-duck Trump administration just announced that it will publish a "call for nominations" tomorrow, asking oil companies to identify their preferences on areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain to lease for oil drilling. The Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge, part of America's Arctic in Alaska, is land considered sacred by Indigenous people. It serves as the biological heart of the Refuge, an irreplaceable landscape with global ecological significance.
In response to the news, Earthjustice Deputy Managing Attorney Erik Grafe, based in Anchorage, issued the following statement:
"This is the Trump administration's midnight effort to sell off irreplaceable lands in the refuge before a new day dawns. We are already in court challenging the administration's decision to open the whole coastal plain to leasing, and we'll hold the line against this rushed attempt to implement the unlawful program. As the majority of Americans know, the Arctic Refuge is no place to drill."
In August, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's decision to allow oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on behalf of the National Audubon Society, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Friends of the Earth. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a fourth plaintiff, also serves as co-counsel.
The lawsuit calls for the court to block the leasing program because its approval ignored federal law, violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and the National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act. The Department of Interior's oil leasing program maximizes oil development at the expense of all other protected values in the Refuge, and ignores important requirements designed to avoid such damage. The law requires Interior to fulfill all purposes of the refuge, including preserving wildlife, water, wilderness, and recreation. Yet Interior's plan does not come close to this--it opens the entire coastal plain to oil leasing, while rushing to hold this sale a full year before the deadline mandated by the 2017 Tax Act.
Read the complaint.
The lawsuit filed by Earthjustice and NRDC is one of four challenging oil drilling plans in the Arctic Refuge. Read a full coalition press statement responding to today's news.
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.
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"These mass, illegal firings will not stop us," said organizers. "Make no mistake, we will continue organizing until the company drops Project Nimbus and stops powering this genocide."
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The peace coalition No Tech for Apartheid accused Google of a "flagrant act of retaliation" late Wednesday night as the Silicon Valley giant announced it had fired 28 workers over protests against its cloud services contract with the Israeli government.
The firings came after Google organizers held two 10-hour sit-ins at the company's offices in Sunnyvale, California and New York City, demanding the termination of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract under which Google and Amazon provide cloud infrastructure and data services for Israel—without any oversight regarding whether the Israel Defense Forces uses the services in its occupation of Palestinian territories and bombardment of Gaza.
Workers have denounced Project Nimbus since it was announced in 2021, but Israel's killing of at least 33,970 Palestinians in Gaza since October and its intentional starvation of civilians led employees to escalate their protests.
No Tech for Apartheid said in a statement that Google officials called the police to both offices to arrest nine protesters—dubbed the Nimbus Nine—on Tuesday morning, before utilizing "a dragnet of in-office surveillance" to fire nearly two dozen other employees on Wednesday.
"They punished all of the workers they could associate with this action in wholesale firings," said the coalition, which includes Jewish Voice for Peace and MPower Change, a Muslim-led anti-war group.
Google accused the workers of "bullying," "harassment," defacing property, and physically impeding other employees—allegations No Tech for Apartheid rejected as it noted organizers "have yet to hear from a single executive about" their concerns over Google's collaboration with Israel.
"This excuse to avoid confronting us and our concerns directly, and attempt to justify its illegal, retaliatory firings, is a lie," said the workers. "Even the workers who were participating in a peaceful sit-in and refusing to leave did not damage property or threaten other workers. Instead they received an overwhelmingly positive response and shows of support."
The organizers staged the sit-ins on the heels of reporting in Time magazine about new negotiations between Google and the Israeli government regarding further potential tech contracts.
Kate J. Sim, a child safety policy adviser at Google who said she was among those fired this week, said the terminations show "how terrified [executives] are of worker power."
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Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Project on Surveillance Oversight, also praised the House's FANFSA passage on Wednesday.
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While claiming that President Joe Biden backs "Palestinian aspirations for statehood," one of the cables asserts that "it remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors."
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As The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Daniel Boguslaw noted:
Since 2011, the U.N. Security Council has rejected the Palestinian Authority's request for full member status. On April 2, the Palestinian Observer Mission to the U.N. requested that the council once again take up consideration of its membership application. According to the first State Department cable, U.N. meetings since the beginning of April suggest that Algeria, China, Guyana, Mozambique, Russia, Slovenia, Sierra Leone, and Malta support granting Palestine full membership to the U.N. It also says that France, Japan, and Korea are undecided, while the United Kingdom will likely abstain from a vote.
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