August, 03 2021, 11:14am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Ellen Montgomery, Public Lands Campaign Director: lmontgomery@
Josh Chetwynd, Communications Manager: jchetwynd@
Statement: Interior Department makes an important move to slow development of Arctic leases
After announcing suspension of Trump-era leases, the Biden administration will conduct a new environmental review
DENVER
The Department of the Interior announced Tuesday that it will begin a new environmental review of oil drilling's impact on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The review will include examining the effects of drilling on such wildlife as caribou and polar bears, as well as on surface waters and climate change.
Under the Trump administration, nine leases were awarded in the Arctic National Refuge in January 2021. In response to the lease sale, Environment America joined the Gwich'in Steering Committee and 11 other groups in a legal effort to protect this important and iconic land. The Trump administration rushed the lease sale and no major oil companies bid on tracts. However, a public corporation of the State of Alaska, called the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), was the highest bidder for most of the tracts leased. The Biden administration has suspended the nine leases pending the results of this environmental review.
In response, Environment America Public Lands Campaign Director Ellen Montgomery issued the following statement:
"We are pleased to see the Biden administration making progress in their review of the Trump administration leases. We are confident that the Department of the Interior will find that developing these leases would cause irreparable damage to the pristine landscape and the wildlife that make their home there. But the Biden administration can only pause drilling. Congress must act to fully end the leasing program in the Arctic Refuge. We cannot have another lease sale that opens up polar bear denning areas, caribou calving grounds and the destination of hundreds of migratory birds to the invasive and polluting activities that come with oil excavation. We urge Congress to act quickly to protect the refuge."
With Environment America, you protect the places that all of us love and promote core environmental values, such as clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean energy to power our lives. We're a national network of 29 state environmental groups with members and supporters in every state. Together, we focus on timely, targeted action that wins tangible improvements in the quality of our environment and our lives.
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Senate GOP Sends Trump Bill Handing Over Arctic Refuge to Big Oil
"Once again, oil and gas development is taking precedence over science-based solutions for conserving wildlife and mitigating climate change," said one campaigner.
Dec 04, 2025
Climate campaigners, conservationists, and Indigenous people vowed to keep defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after US Senate Republicans on Thursday sent legislation that would restart fossil fuel leasing in ANWR's Coastal Plain to President Donald Trump's desk.
All Republicans present except Sen. Susan Collins of Maine supported House Joint Resolution 131. The 49-45 vote came after three Democrats—Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas)—joined all GOP House members but Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) in advancing the bill last month.
If Big Oil-backed Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval, as expected, it will nullify the Biden administration's December 2024 efforts to protect over 1 million acres of land in Alaska from planet-wrecking oil and gas exploration.
"Simply put, the Arctic refuge is the crown jewel of the American National Wildlife Refuge System," Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) said in a Wednesday floor speech against the measure, noting that the area is "home to hundreds of iconic wildlife species."
"The Arctic refuge is also deeply connected to the traditions and daily life of the people who have lived there for thousands of years," the senator continued, ripping "the Trump administration's relentless attacks on public lands."
Heinrich's speech was welcomed by groups including the Alaska Wilderness League, League of Conservation Voters, and Defenders of Wildlife, whose vice president of government relations, Robert Dewey, also blasted lawmakers' use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the refuge's protections.
"Once again, oil and gas development is taking precedence over science-based solutions for conserving wildlife and mitigating climate change. In these instances, the use of the CRA accomplishes nothing meaningful and instead harms iconic species such as polar bears, caribou, wolves, and migratory birds," Dewey said after the vote. "In addition to threatening wildlife, severe regulatory disruption in Alaska is the inevitable result of targeted rollbacks in one of America's most ecologically critical regions."
Andy Moderow, senior director of policy at Alaska Wilderness League, said Thursday that "while we are deeply disappointed by the final vote, we're grateful to see bipartisan support from lawmakers who stood up for the Refuge and upheld a long-standing, cross-party legacy of protecting this truly incredible place."
"America's public lands—including the iconic Arctic refuge—shouldn't be on the shortlist for a public land selloff to the oil and gas industry," Moderow continued. "We'll continue fighting the management chaos brought by today's vote in favor of actions that respect the Arctic Refuge for what it actually is: a national wildlife refuge, and not an oilfield."
Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, a group formed decades ago by Alaska Natives in response to proposed oil drilling in the Coastal Plain, also spoke out after the Senate vote.
"The Gwich'in Nation views the decision by lawmakers to leverage the Congressional Review Act to advance oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a deliberate attempt to undercut the standards and laws that are designed to protect this sacred landscape," Moreland said.
"This action from DC ignores years of consultation and communication with our Gwich'in communities that rely on this landscape for not only our subsistence and survival, but also our culture and spiritual health and well-being," she added. "We stand united in our opposition to any oil and gas development in the Arctic refuge, and will continue to fight this effort from the Trump administration and decision-makers who ignore our voices."
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From Soaring Energy Prices to Climate Threat to AI Bubble, Experts Warn Against Data Center Buildout
“Tech giants are cutting backroom deals with utilities and government officials to build massive data centers at breakneck speed, while passing the costs onto working families," said the author of a new Public Citizen report.
Dec 04, 2025
As the construction of artificial intelligence data centers expands across the nation largely unregulated, experts warn that the unrestrained buildup of these facilities is causing electricity costs to skyrocket, accelerating the climate crisis, and putting the economy at risk.
A new report out Thursday from the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen highlights the "unchecked expansion" of these data centers, often with little oversight, input from communities, or even financial responsibility on the part of the Big Tech firms profiting.
“We’re watching Big Tech overlords write their own rules in real time,” said Deanna Noël, Public Citizen's climate campaigns director and one of the report's authors. “Tech giants are cutting backroom deals with utilities and government officials to build massive data centers at breakneck speed, while passing the costs onto working families through higher electricity bills, polluted air and water, and false claims about job creation."
A forecast published earlier this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance projected that the power demand for AI facilities will hit 106 gigawatts by 2035—a 36% jump from what it predicted back in April.
That dramatic increase, it said, can be attributed not just to the more rapid buildup of AI facilities, but also to the size of the ones being constructed: "Of the nearly 150 new data center projects BNEF added to its tracker in the last year, nearly a quarter exceed 500 megawatts," it found.
This faster-than-expected expansion has come with massive consequences for the people living near the power-sucking behemoths. Public Citizen's report found:
Residents’ electricity costs in some data center-dense areas have surged over 250% in just five years. At PJM—the world’s largest power market—capacity auction prices spiked 800% in 2024, in part due to data center growth. That same year, consumers across seven PJM states paid $4.3 billion more in electricity costs to cover data centers’ new transmission infrastructure.
On Wednesday, CNBC reported on findings from a watchdog report that PJM's 65 million consumers will pay a total of $16.6 billion to secure future power supplies needed to meet demand from AI data centers from now until 2027, approximately $255 per person on average.
In some of the states with the most data centers, residential electricity prices have spiked considerably over the past year. In September, they were up 20% in Illinois, 12% in Ohio, and 9% in Virginia, according to data from the federal Energy Information Administration.
The massive surge in electricity usage is also fueling the climate crisis. As of March 2025, 56% of the electricity used to power data centers came from fossil fuels, a share that is likely to increase now that the Trump administration has pushed to expand the extraction of coal and other planet-heating energy sources in order to power them.
"At the very moment we must rapidly phase out fossil fuels," Noël said, "the Trump administration is doing the opposite—fast-tracking data center development powered by coal, oil, and gas."
Tech companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google that benefit from these projects rarely have to bear the full economic cost, instead passing some of it onto taxpayers, often without public debate due to nondisclosure agreements that keep the details of proposals under wraps until deals are finalized.
"In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue," a June CNBC investigation found. The report determined that 42 states provide full or partial sales tax exemptions to data centers or have no sales tax at all. Thirty-seven of those states have legislation specifically granting sales tax exemptions for data centers.
While these exemptions are often granted following promises of economic growth and job creation, as the Public Citizen report argues: "They rarely deliver on these promises. Data centers create few permanent, high-paying jobs, and generous tax breaks deprive communities of critical revenue needed to fund schools, infrastructure, and other public services."
Data centers have increasingly faced pushback from local communities. On Wednesday night in Howell, Michigan, over 150 people assembled at a town hall in opposition to a proposed $1 billion "hyperscale" data center project backed by Meta, following days of protest.
“Already we have started to see many regions (across the country) realizing that the huge spike in electricity demand from data centers is straining the grid, and this is only going to get worse as the growth of data centers increases based on the projected and planned investments,” said one of the panelists, Ben Green, an assistant professor of information and public policy at the University of Michigan.
Economic analysts, meanwhile, remain skeptical about whether the rapid buildup of AI infrastructure will be sustainable in the long term, given the extraordinary energy demand.
In November, Morgan Stanley projected AI-related data center spending will total $2.9 trillion cumulatively from 2025 to 2028, with roughly half requiring external financing.
Abe Silverman, general counsel for the public utility board in New Jersey, pointed out to CNBC the unease communities are feeling about "paying money today for a data center tomorrow."
“We’re in a bit of a bubble,” he warned. “There is no question that data center developers are coming out of the woodwork, putting in massive numbers of new requests. It’s impossible to say exactly how many of them are speculative versus real.”
Cathy Kunkel, a consultant at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said, "It does tend to be consumers—residential, commercial, and other industrial ratepayers—that end up paying for overbuilt electrical infrastructure."
The health of the entire US economy, it turns out, may be hitched to this "bubble." As the Wall Street Journal reported in late November, "business investment in AI might have accounted for as much as half of the growth in gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, in the first six months of the year."
OpenAI founder Sam Altman raised eyebrows last month when he suggested that if the bubble bursts, his company is too big to fail, and would likely receive a large taxpayer-funded federal bailout: "When something gets sufficiently huge... the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort as we've seen in various financial crises," Altman said. "So I guess given the magnitude of what I expect AI economic impact to look like, sort of I do think the government ends up as like the insurer of last resort."
A looming financial bubble related to AI's rapid growth, alongside the various other concerns related to the data center buildout, is why Public Citizen says policymakers must understand the gravity the situation and be willing to push back against an industry that has built an army of lobbyists to press its interests on Capitol Hill.
"Policymakers at all levels of government must act with urgency to rein in Big Tech’s unchecked expansion," Noël said. "By demanding transparency and accountability, enforcing strong community protections, and requiring clean and cheap renewable energy, policymakers can shield consumers from soaring electricity costs, reduce emissions to protect public health, and align this buildout with the clean energy transition.
"Without urgent intervention," she said, "Big Tech will continue getting a free ride while more neighborhoods are turned into sacrifice zones for Silicon Valley’s tech tycoons—fueled by the fossil fuel industry.”
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'Where Is Yuanxin?' 6-Year-Old Missing in DHS Custody After ICE Separated Him From Father at Check-In
"Six-year-old Yuanxin had just enrolled in the first grade at an elementary school in Astoria," said Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. "Now he's in custody, alone. ICE won't say where. This cruelty serves no one."
Dec 04, 2025
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams on Thursday said the Trump administration continues to tell the "cruel lie" that it does not separate children from their families in immigration enforcement, as he joined other city officials and advocates in demanding the Department of Homeland Security immediately release a six-year-old boy who was taken from his father during an immigration check-in in Manhattan more than a week ago.
"Six-year-old asylum-seeker Yuanxin has been separated from his father, held at an undisclosed location," said Williams.
As The City reported Tuesday, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Yuanxin's father, Fei, when they arrived at 26 Federal Plaza—the ICE headquarters and immigration court that's become notorious for federal agents' violent treatment of immigrants and advocates under President Donald Trump—on November 26.
Fei, who sought asylum when he and his son crossed the US border in April, was sent to Orange County Jail in New York, while his son, a public school student in Queens, was separated from him. ICE agents did not tell Fei where they were taking Yuanxin.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, said in a statement this week that while agents were attempting to take Fei north to Orange County, he "was acting so disruptive and aggressive that he endangered the child’s well-being." She accused him of attempting to "escape and abandon his son."
While acknowledging that the two had been separated, McLaughlin said, "ICE does not separate families.”
A judge "administratively closed" the family's asylum case in September, The City reported, which "would have been seen as a positive step and indicated that DHS wasn’t actively seeking the person’s deportation" under previous administrations.
They were also released on a yearlong parole after having been previously detained, and were required to visit 26 Federal Plaza for check-ins with ICE.
According to the Deportation Data Project, at least 151 children under the age of 18 have been arrested and detained by ICE since January.
Diana Moreno, an immigrant rights advocate who is running for the state Assembly in District 36, spoke to CBS News on Tuesday about Yuanxin's detention.
"To see their classmates disappear overnight is something that no parent wants to explain to their kid why this is happening," said Moreno.
The New York Immigration Coalition also demanded that the father and son "be reunited with each other immediately," while Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani condemned the Trump administration's "cruelty."
"Six-year-old Yuanxin had just enrolled in the first grade at an elementary school in Astoria," said Mamdani. "Now he's in custody, alone. ICE won't say where. This cruelty serves no one. It must end."
Chuck Park, a candidate for US Congress in New York's 6th District, also in Queens, said Yuanxin "looks like my son did at that age."
"Big glasses. Sweet smile," said Park. "Now alone, scared at an unknown ICE detention center. Taken from his dad at a routine check-in. This is what we're fighting against. This kid is who we're fighting for."
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