What’s next?

….nothing to see here….

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) just let us know that there will be no public review of a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The original Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) issued in 2022 was found faulty, calling on a review and revision of the 2022 EIS, and a reissue of a “Supplemental” EIS. This EIS will bypass public review and comment, so we just got to trust them on this, I guess…

Public review is the heart of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) which was “streamlined” by the last Trump Administration, released in December 2020, at the closing moments of their previous chaos. We submitted fairly comprehensive comments to the 2020 revisions, anticipating that a lot of the hideous revisions would be retracted or rolled back by the Biden Administration. This was only partially the case; some of the 2020 revisions remained.

That notwithstanding, apparently the current administration’s interpretation of NEPA is that their revisions of the Supplemental EIS’s don’t get reviewed again, because “The Court responded and revised the document appropriately to the public and stakeholder’s interests.”

Most of the Cook Inlet environmental concerns orbit around the Beluga whales, of which only about 300 remain. So for me this puts in place NOAA’s severance of Manolo Castellote – one of the world’s preeminent marine mammalogists, who has been studying the Cook Inlet Beluga whales for the last 15 years. I originally thought his ‘termination’ was just more “DOGE” cannon fodder. Now it seems that it was part of the plan. (Exactly who drew up the proposed “environmental study” anyway?)

We have not yet seen how the current administration has synthesized any of the EIS comments we submitted this year; the revised 5-year offshore leasing plan, the Seabed mining request, and rescinding the word “Harm” from the Endangered Species Act, but given their proclivity to pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, my suspicions are that they will ignore all public input and just see what we’ll do about it.