Political Memes

From the very fucking source I posted:

Some Alaska Natives are critical of the drilling ban across such a significant swath of the NPR-A. It has proved controversial with Alaska’s bipartisan congressional delegation, as well as Alaska Native groups who say they depend on the tax revenue from oil drilling to fund schools and basic services.

The final rule “does not reflect our communities’ wishes,” said Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat President Nagruk Harcharek, adding the move “will hurt the very residents the federal government purports to help by rolling back years of progress, impoverishing our communities, and imperiling our Iñupiaq culture.”

The ban will also open the president to attacks from Republicans that he is failing to prioritize American energy independence and is driving up the price of gasoline. But under Biden’s tenure, the US is producing more oil than any country in history, CNN Business reported, and gas prices are down $1.35 from their all-time high in June 2022.

In addition to protecting a vast amount of the NPR-A on Friday, the Biden administration moved to block the Trump administration-approved Ambler road in the Alaskan wilderness. If built, the road would serve as the access point for a proposed copper mine. The administration signaled it wanted to take “no action” on the mine, effectively blocking the road’s access to federal land.

In a statement, Ambler Metals, the company seeking to mine copper in the region, said it was “deeply disappointed” in Interior’s decision. Ambler’s managing director Kaleb Froehlich said the move would deprive local communities of jobs and tax revenue and prevent the US “from developing a domestic supply of minerals that are critical for clean energy technology and national security.”

The Alaska announcements cap off a week that saw a flurry of actions from Biden’s Interior Department. On Thursday, the department announced a new rule that elevated conservation to put it on equal footing as other public land uses like grazing, mining and other energy development. The new conservation rule covers 245 million acres largely in the Western United States – about a tenth of the land in the nation.

But sure, it's just all the big bad corpos, they're all on one side, and the people are on another. Anyone who does anything that helps the corpos is just their slave. Politics is delightfully simple, it would seem.