State health officials say humans are safe, especially if the milk they drink is pasteurized

Laying out his vision of a modern, booming New Mexico economy, state Sen. Michael Padilla, D, touted a bill in the 2025 legislative session that he said would incentivize “the construction and installation of microgrids in underserved communities across New Mexico.” Crucially, he added, the development of microgrids for projects like subdivisions or data centers would align “with our environmental goals by facilitating the use of clean energy technologies and reducing greenhouse gases.” 

As electricity demand spikes across the U.S. and rolling blackouts plague regional grids, hospitals, universities, small towns, low-income communities and tribes have turned to microgrids for resilient, self-sourced energy powered by solar or wind. By all accounts, Senate Bill 418 appeared to facilitate just that.

Padilla’s initial bill failed, but after some tense, eleventh-hour negotiations, a pared down version passed as an amendment to a broader grid modernization measure. No microgrid in particular was mentioned during the vote. Only in hindsight did it become clear that the amendment was tailor-made for industry, including the construction of what was to become one of the most controversial A.I. data centers in the West — Project Jupiter, a sprawling 1,400-acre campus slated for southern New Mexico.

“I feel really hoodwinked in some ways,” House Rep. Kristina Ortez, D, told High Country News. In the final throes of the session, Sen. Padilla added the amendment, which Ortez, one of HB 93’s co-authors, believed would benefit local hospitals, schools, and fire departments. It wasn’t until months later, when Project Jupiter sparked local opposition, that the realization washed over her: “Oh, my God, this is what that amendment allowed to happen.” 

WHEN PADILLA DESCRIBED his bill in a committee meeting, he did so beside Jennifer Bradfute, a lobbyist for Borderplex Digital Assets, one of Project Jupiter’s developers, who he introduced as an “energy expert.” Bradfute said she was working on large digital infrastructure projects in the Borderplex region, which includes Las Cruces and Santa Teresa, New Mexico, El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, as well as in central New Mexico near Isleta Pueblo. “Our development is focused on solar power generation,” Bradfute said. “The flexibility of using microgrids that could be developed sooner than some of what our public utilities can provide would also provide power solutions for some of our Native American areas throughout the state that have not been able to be served by our public utilities so far.” 

Later, in a follow-up hearing, she emphasized the bill was needed “so we can have sufficient legal certainty to invest $5 billion and create 1,000 jobs.” 

Though the microgrid bill had early support, it ultimately died due to environmental concerns. However, just as New Mexico’s 60-day legislative session was wrapping up, another Democrat, House Rep. Nathan Small, held an eleventh-hour meeting in his chambers to try and push through certain language from the microgrid bill in the form of an amendment to House Bill 93. This bill aimed to modernize New Mexico’s electrical grid, and the amendment sought to permit the generation and distribution of self-sourced power, allowing “qualified” microgrids to produce 20 megawatts or more of energy — enough to power a small city.

The amendment also stated that unless a microgrid sought to sell energy to a public utility company, it would not be regulated by state authorities. The negotiations in Small’s chambers led to an added provision saying that all microgrids had to conform to the Energy Transition Act, or ETA, , which would require all of the energy they generate and sell to be from net-zero carbon resources by 2045. 

Later that day, Padilla brought the amendment to the state Senate with a brief introduction. Paper copies of the language were then handed out, and senators were still reading it when a voice vote was called to add the amendment to the bill. Minutes later, the entire measure passed the Senate. The following day, the House concurred, and the amended bill was approved. 

The bill has now opened the door for Project Jupiter and other major industrial development — huge projects that differ markedly from what the microgrid amendment once seemed to promise.

“Since that legislation has passed,” Padilla said in an interview with HCN in late October, “You have Castileon in Rio Rancho,” he said. “You have Pacific Fusion in my district up in Mesa del Sol. So our state really did get really ignited economically.” 

Near a subdivision in Rio Rancho, Castileon Corp. is building Project Ranger, a 1,000-acre hypersonic missile manufacturing facility that could lead to dangerous chemical fires, according to reporting in Wired magazine. Pacific Fusion has broken ground on a $1 billion research and manufacturing campus near Albuquerque to build modular nuclear fusion power plants for nuclear weapons research. Both projects purport to create hundreds of local jobs. 

PROJECT JUPITER’S MICROGRID AIMS to generate about the same amount of energy as New Mexico’s largest public utility company, PNM. That’s enough to power half a million homes and more than 100 times the amendment’s 20-megawatt minimum — all from one microgrid powered by fuel cells converting natural gas into electricity. 

Project Jupiter’s next hurdle is an air quality permit from the New Mexico Environment Department, or NMED. After NMED posed questions “concerning the accuracy of emissions testing” in the permit application, two Project Jupiter developers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Yucca Growth Infrastructure, said they would reduce projected emissions by 35%, from 8.8 million tons to 5.7 million tons per year.

“NMED’s staff asked hard technical questions, and they pushed us to address the concerns raised by the public,” said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president and head of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in a statement. (The data center campus is already under construction, while the microgrid, a separate facility subject to the air quality permit, is not.)

But even the reduced amount of emissions would be comparable to “the total pollution created by the cities of Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Las Cruces, combined,” according to Mariel Nanasi, a senior attorney and executive director of New Energy Economy, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that advocates for clean energy in frontline communities. The nonprofit filed a motion to dismiss Project Jupiter’s air quality permit application; Nanasi noted that those 5 million tons of emissions would be emitted in the Paso del Norte region, which includes Santa Teresa, an “already vulnerable environmental justice community.”

The microgrid amendment to HB 93 was “the precursor to Project Jupiter,” according to Nanasi.

Before the amendment went into effect, a 2019 law mandating that public utilities transition to renewable energy gave the Environment Department and the Public Regulation Commission, the state regulator that oversees public utility companies, oversight of entities not normally under their purview if there was a “material increase” in those entities’ greenhouse gas emissions. Solar panels on a single house or a backup generator for a hospital wouldn’t trigger that oversight because the energy would be negligible, Nanasi said, but Project Jupiter certainly would have. 

Given the size of its projected greenhouse gas emissions, “Project Jupiter would not have passed muster under the renewable portfolio standard,” Nanasi said, calling the effort an “end run around public regulation.”

In the 2026 legislative session, Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D, proposed a microgrid oversight bill that would have given the state the authority to regulate microgrids, required proof that microgrids meet renewable energy standards, and prevented microgrids from increasing utility rates. It passed the Senate but did not get a hearing in the House. 

MUCH OF WHAT ENABLED Project Jupiter so far happened under the radar. In late 2024, state officials from the Environment Department and other agencies convened to draft the terms of a memorandum of understanding with Bradfute, the Borderplex Digital Assets lobbyist, which Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in February of the following year at an official signing. According to a press release, the state had entered into a “groundbreaking partnership” that was projected to bring 1,000 jobs to the Borderlands and billions of dollars in construction, IT and equipment purchases. Padilla and Small were both present at the signing.

Nukes and AI require 1.4 million gallons of water a day at New Mexico lab

Save for this announcement, Project Jupiter was virtually unknown to the public when the 2025 legislative session began. So was Borderplex Digital Assets, the Austin-based tech company that was helping to develop it. The company did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

It was around this time that Small, arguably one of the most powerful Democrats in the New Mexico Legislature, held a meeting with the environmental advocates who’d rallied against the original Senate bill. Small made it clear to the advocates that the only option was to come to an agreement, enabling an unnamed project he characterized as a boon to the economy of southern New Mexico and a way to diversify from oil and gas. At the table were Bradfute, of Borderplex Digital Assets, and Cholla Khoury, the chief of staff of the Public Regulation Commission. 

After hours of tense negotiation, the advocates conceded to the amendment on the condition that it include language mandating that any energy generated and sold from a qualified microgrid had to abide by the 2045 renewables deadline set by the Energy Transition Act. To some, that was little consolation. 

Later that evening, Bradfute made a few final revisions by email, saying she’d send them to the “drafter,” the legal professional charged with making the language statute-worthy. Less than an hour later, the amendment was being voted on by the Senate.

This reporting is based on multiple interviews with more than a dozen people and reviews of emails obtained by HCN through a public records request.

“As the Chair of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, I am frequently invited to meetings by stakeholders, including environmental advocates, who want to discuss important legislation that may have a significant fiscal impact on our state,” said Small in a statement to HCN. “Without this bill, the state would have a much harder time regulating the exploding number of microgrids coming online in the next decade and keeping energy costs down for New Mexicans.” 

A Public Regulation Commission spokesperson said in an email, “Chief of Staff Cholla Khoury attended the March 20, 2025 meeting to provide information regarding PRC authority and regulation of investor-owned utilities in New Mexico.” He added, “The PRC provided information only and did not support any agreement or subsequent legislation.”

Jennifer Bradfute did not respond to questions from HCN.

ORTEZ, ONE OF HB 93’s CO-AUTHORS, said she was debating another bill on the House floor when that meeting was taking place and only learned about it afterward from some of the environmental advocates present. Among them was Tammy Fiebelkorn, government affairs manager for Western Resource Advocates and an Albuquerque City Councilor. She spoke about the closed-door meeting at an interim committee hearing last year under questioning from House Rep. Micaela Lara Cadena, whose district covers the area where Project Jupiter seeks to operate.

“This is one of the dirtiest pieces of politics I’ve now seen and felt in our political body,” Cadena said to hearing participants after the questioning.

Western Resource Advocates declined to comment. 

Sen. Padilla, who was present at the hearing, was adamant that nothing “underhanded” happened and that he’d had “very detailed conversations” with Ortez in the lead-up, “so that she knew exactly what we were doing on the Senate side.” 

Ortez told HCN, “I don’t remember having an in-depth conversation with him. I surely did not have the conversation that this was for a data center. Absolutely that did not happen.” 

Ortez said that another Borderplex Digital Assets lobbyist, Vanessa Alarid, a controversial figure, sent her a $10,000 campaign donation, which Ortez said she promptly returned. (The donation is not reflected in campaign finance records, a search by HCN found.) Rep. Small also received a $10,000 donation from Borderplex Digital Assets in August 2025, according to campaign finance records, which he returned in June 2026, after the primaries. “I returned the contribution from Borderplex in response to the environmental and community concerns I heard from constituents in our district about this new, fast-moving industry,” he said in an email to HCN, adding that he now supports a temporary data center moratorium. Alarid did not respond to a request for comment.

Padilla received multiple campaign donations in a single day totaling $42,400 from a cluster of people related to Alarid. “I raise money from a lot of different sources,” he said of the campaign donations. “I don’t know who she’s connected to or not connected to.”

An amendment that enabled microgrids to operate in the state could have been a “good thing,” Ortez said. They are often considered a sustainable alternative to electrical utility monopolies. But microgrids can also be Trojan horses for industry, including data centers. 

When asked if the microgrid amendment was a lesson to other states, Ortez was blunt: “Hell yeah, this is a cautionary tale. As a legislator, when there are amendments that you don’t know the ramifications of, you have to continually ask.”

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

The post How a law to allow microgrids made way for a massive data center in New Mexico appeared first on High Country News.

By the time the three hikers called for help from a rocky face on Mount Shasta in Northern California, they’d made a series of bad decisions. They didn’t bring enough food, and they’d overestimated their fitness. Instead of turning back in late afternoon when they hadn’t yet reached the top, they summited at 7:30 p.m. and had to descend in the dark. Their lack of preparation and poor planning, as they admitted later, came partly from relying on Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini. By morning, they were lost on a gnarly part of the mountain, and one hiker had banged up his knee.

“We get plenty of people who come unprepared or don’t do any research at all. To these guys’ credit, they did try,” said Nick Meyers, U.S. Forest Service program manager of the Mount Shasta Wilderness Climbing and Avalanche Center, which responded to the call. “But I think they kind of turned their brains off.”

The three 20-year-olds aren’t the only ones making missteps in wild spaces with the help of artificial intelligence. Another Mount Shasta visitor pitched her tent near a “No Camping” sign, insisting she had a right to do so because AI told her she could, Meyers said. His team also encountered a man wandering around at a trailhead with an AI-generated map that showed prominent features on the wrong side of a nearby mountain. In British Columbia, a helicopter crew rescued a 16-year-old hiker from a ledge in the Widowmaker Arete on the back of Crown Mountain. The teen had used Anthropic’s chatbot Claude to help him plan his trip. News stories focused on that fact went viral across Canada and the U.S., though the hiker said later that he also consulted Google Maps and the popular hiking app, AllTrails.

Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming has also seen a marked uptick over the past year in the percentage of visitors who report using AI for travel information, said Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins. “It went from zero to 26%. And I’m guessing that curve is not going to flatten.”

“I think they kind of turned their brains off.”

It remains to be seen whether increasing AI use will lead to an increase in backcountry accidents and search and rescues, Meyers said. His office, which oversees a massive wilderness area in Northern California, averages a dozen rescues each year, and 2026 is shaping up to be an average year. Calls to search and rescue in Wyoming have actually gone down compared to 2025, with only 312 calls so far in 2026 compared to a total of 466 in 2025 and 377 in 2024.

Some search and rescue veterans say that AI chatbots are just the latest tools giving people new ways to get into trouble. Roughly a decade ago, when hikers, backpackers, climbers and other outdoor enthusiasts began to source their destinations, inspiration and information from Instagram and other social media sites, they faced sometimes deadly consequences. Before that, hikers and other recreationists were led astray by their reliance on Google Maps or smartphone connectivity.

“Over the last two decades, there’s been a phenomenal push in the media to get more people outdoors, and consequently we have more people outdoors and recreating,” said Jim Moss, a Colorado-based recreation attorney and search and rescue volunteer. It’s still unclear how questionable advice from a robot will influence all those people, he added.

Turning to an AI chatbot for guidance does come with unique risks. Not only can chatbots “hallucinate,” persuasively presenting misinformation as real, but their use can lead to a phenomenon called “cognitive surrender,” said Chris Flathmann, a human-centered computing professor at Clemson University in South Carolina who has studied AI and search and rescue.

“When humans work with AI systems, they can get so deep into it they give up thinking critically for themselves,” he explained. When AI pretends to be an expert on an unfamiliar topic, “you can’t call BS on that, because you don’t have the expertise.” And once you stop thinking critically, it can be hard to start again, especially in a stressful backcountry situation.

Chatbots also tend to tell users what they want to hear, and to do so with authority regardless of whether the sources they’re consulting are reliable, Flathmann and others said. Claude or ChatGPT might answer a query with extensive directions and advice that sound credible but are actually scraped from Reddit threads and out-of-date YouTube videos — and might even be entirely fabricated.

Access to public land? There’s an app for that

TikTok and Instagram may offer a viewer inspiration, but AI tends to offer instructions — right or wrong — as well as encouragement, Flathmann said. “AI isn’t trying to trick people into going up mountains, but I think it’s the natural evolution of what happens when you get a tool like this.”

Regardless of the resources recreators use, experts have the same advice: When you’re headed to a new place, make sure you double-check your information against reliable, authoritative sources like up-to-date public-land agency maps and websites, trail association websites or guidebooks. Even better, talk to a real-live guide, a national forest official or a park ranger.

“If you’re going to go into places that will kill you,” Meyers said, “you should take your planning seriously.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.

The post AI gets people into trouble in the backcountry appeared first on High Country News.

The debate was moderated by Kyle Clark of 9News, who sometimes had to jump in to gain control, as verbal attacks flew and the candidates talked over one another

Firefighter Will Vogl uses hair sheep to practice soil conservation and wildfire mitigation among clients around his El Paso County regenerative agriculture operation.

This story was originally published by Bolts Magazine and is republished here by permission.

Mike Pese visited the grave of his mother, Miliama Suli, in Anchorage on Sept. 13, as he has every week since she died in March. 

On previous visits, he’d shared with her his fears about the yearslong legal case hanging over his family: The Republican-led state attorney general’s office had moved to convict him and 10 relatives for illegally voting, threatening up to 10 years of prison time. 

The family lived together in the small harbor town of Whittier, Alaska. They all hail originally from the faraway U.S. territory of American Samoa, which they thought gave them the right to vote in their local elections, as is the case for people born in every other U.S. state and territory. But unbeknownst to them, and even to many Alaska officials, American Samoans are denied voting rights outside of American Samoa, since they are classified as U.S. nationals and not citizens. 

State officials accused them of intentionally voting as non-citizens, and filed the criminal charges that have consumed Pese’s family for nearly three years. 

But Sunday’s cemetery visit was a celebration. Pese brought balloons, flowers, and Samoan-style pork buns, plus his wife and kids, and they shared the good news with Suli: Late Friday, Alaska prosecutors, fresh off a loss at the state Court of Appeals, had decided to drop the voter fraud charges against this family.

“It’s a huge amount of weight lifted off my shoulders,” Pese told Bolts from the gravesite. “I’ve never been stressed out so badly.”

His mother, who had been among the 11 defendants in the case, died while under prosecution. On her death bed, Suli, matriarch of the robust American Samoan community in Whittier, told friends and family how worried she was about the case. “She would praise the Lord and she would throw a barbecue to celebrate this victory,” Pese said. “I know she’s really happy right now.”

Equally relieved was Pese’s wife, Tupe Smith, whose 2023 victory in a local school board election set off the chain of events that led to the prosecutions. When she heard the news last week, Smith said, “I cried and I thanked God. I don’t have to stress anymore. We have kids and we don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to us.”

The prosecutions were a harsh civics lesson for American Samoans like Smith and Pese, who, as U.S. nationals, live in a sort of limbo status that confers various privileges, such as Social Security and a U.S. passport, but that also denies the right to vote in state or local elections—much less to seek elected office—if they ever move from American Samoa to another part of the country. For election purposes on any U.S. soil outside of American Samoa, they’re treated as though they are non-citizen immigrants.

The Whittier relatives are among thousands of American Samoan nationals living in Alaska. Like many in that community, they had been confused about their voting rights. Smith told the Alaska state troopers who arrested her in 2023 that she’d thought she could participate in local elections, but not in presidential elections. 

Even the cops who arrested Smith—and then returned months later to interrogate 10 of her relatives—were themselves confused about the law. “I thought people of American Samoa were U.S. citizens,” one trooper told Pese, Bolts found in a review of the interrogations.

These Americans were prosecuted for voting

That trooper shares this confusion with many Alaska state lawmakers, elections officials, and police. A yearlong Bolts investigation, published in partnership with High Country News, found that state officials generally had no clear understanding of the voting rights, and lack thereof, of American Samoan nationals, prior to the Whittier case, and that Alaska administrators have in fact proactively registered lots of ineligible voters, and even mailed them voter registration cards.

Nevertheless, the office of the Alaska attorney general, which serves under Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, tagged the 11 Whittier defendants with felony charges carrying the potential of serious prison time.

This move horrified civil rights advocates in Alaska, who told Bolts they felt the prosecution was nothing more than a Trumpian bid to prove the existence of widespread voter fraud by non-citizens, which in fact is extraordinarily rare. The prosecutions also spooked many U.S. nationals outside of Whittier, some of whom have also voted, or at least registered to vote, thanks to Alaska’s longstanding failure to clear up the very confusion that had ensnared people in Whittier.

“There were questions across the whole state,” Tafilisaunoa Toleafoa, executive director of the nonprofit Pacific Community of Alaska, told Bolts on Sunday. “Whittier has a high number of American Samoans, yes, but so do Anchorage and Juneau and Utqiagvik and Fairbanks. Community members have reached out, concerned about the possibility of the same thing happening to them.”

Toleafoa added that while the dropped charges were a welcome step, they resolve neither the general confusion that led to the criminal case, nor the limbo state of U.S. nationals.

“I’d really love to see the American Samoan communities be given what they deserve. American Samoa is the United States and therefore birthright citizenship is a right for all American Samoans,” she said. “We’re going to take the win, but the work continues.”

Relief for the families in Whittier began earlier this month, when the Alaska Court of Appeals dismissed the indictment against Smith, on the grounds that Alaska state troopers had misled her in their original interrogation, and also that prosecutors had misled the grand jury when it secured an indictment against her. The court found that the state failed to prove that Smith had “purposely or deliberately” skirted the law, writing that it was not convinced of the state’s argument that Smith had acted with “consciousness of wrongdoing.”

This ruling applied only to Smith, but seemed to spell trouble for the state’s prosecution of the other Whittier defendants, whose situations were all similar to hers. In filing late last week to dismiss the charges against the rest of the Whittier defendants, the attorney general’s office called the move “a result of the decision by the Court of Appeals,” court documents show.

The office dismissed these charges “without prejudice,” meaning that they retain the option to file new charges against the family members in the future. Bolts asked the office whether it might still pursue charges, and got no response. 

But in a press release following the dismissal, the office reiterated that it still believes Smith lied and said it “respectfully disagrees” with the Court of Appeals finding that the grand jury was misled. “We stand behind the work of the Department of Public Safety and the dedicated troopers who investigated these cases,” Deputy Attorney General Angie Kemp said in the release.

The case might have been largely settled a long time ago, as Alaska prosecutors had offered plea deals to all the defendants but Smith last summer. But the family members unanimously rejected the offers, maintaining that they’d never intentionally broken any laws, and also because they did want to establish a precedent that could harm U.S. nationals in this or any other state.

Now, the Court of Appeals’ ruling in their case seems to raise the standard for future accusations of voter fraud in Alaska involving non-citizens who mistakenly vote; “knowingly” casting a vote, the court ruled, is not the same as “intentionally” violating election law.

As this case dragged on in recent years, it mounted an enormous emotional, mental, and financial cost to the family members.

“I’ve been punishing myself for this,” Nelson Vaimoa, one of the Whittier defendants, told Bolts on Sunday. “I’ve been going to work, trying to work three shifts to get my mind distracted from the case. I’d get home really tired; the case has been bothering me the whole time. Even when I had my daughter’s birthday, when she was 2 years old, it was bothering me. I was too distracted, and I forgot it was her birthday.”

Vaimoa and other defendants had been active members of the Whittier community, including by volunteering as first responders and organizing barbecues and other local events. Whittier is a town of about 300 people, where nearly every resident lives inside one enormous apartment tower. 

Vaimoa called the dropped charges “a big relief,” but added, “I don’t want to volunteer anymore. I don’t feel like helping out anymore. I just want to go to work and come back home. All of the savings I had were canceled, all the plans I had—all because of this case.”

None of these defendants was more of a Whittier pillar than Suli, a local religious and civic leader who owned the small grocery store at the ground floor of the apartment tower. The state continued to prosecute her even as her health declined ahead of her death in March.

Smith said of the state dropping the charges, “The first person that would’ve called my phone was her, calling me and telling me how good God is and telling her to come over to my house.”

Attorneys who represent the Whittier family members celebrated the state’s move, but noted the damage that has already been done.

“These are stand-up people, and to see them treated like criminals was just really disgusting,” said Neil Weare, co-founder of Right to Democracy, which advocates for territorial Americans. “It’s nice to see their good name and reputation getting cleared.”

“These are stand-up people, and to see them treated like criminals was just really disgusting.”

Weare also criticized the state for only dismissing the charges “without prejudice” and leaving the door open to future charges.

“Tupe and Michael deserve to know there won’t be another knock at the door, that this criminal targeting of the American Samoan community is really over,” he said. “An apology would be nice, too.”

Matt DiTullio, an Alaska public defender who worked on the case, added: “I’m relieved that the courts came to the sensible and correct conclusion as to what these statutes are intended to prohibit, and that the state of Alaska followed that to the only just resolution of these cases. It is unfortunate that the Pese family and their community had to endure the stress of facing felony charges for years.”

That stress caused many of the defendants to question their place in Whittier and in Alaska. The prosecution was so traumatizing, defendants told Bolts at various points, that they’ve been considering relocating in order to start afresh.

But, Mike Pese said from the picnic at his mother’s grave on Sunday, “She loved Whittier. She’d made it her home. In the last weeks of her life, we talked about it, and decided we’re going to stay in Whittier and fight for it.”

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

The post American Samoans punished for voting in Alaska get relief after a yearslong nightmare appeared first on High Country News.

This article is co-published with Public Domain.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order singling out the state of Alaska and its abundant stores of oil, gas and minerals. “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” called for expanding oil and gas development across Alaska’s North Slope, including some of the largest tracts of public land in North America.

The administration wanted to reverse regulations and new protections put in place during the previous administration — “punitive restrictions,” according to Trump — and streamline the permitting and review process for new projects, particularly in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve (NPRA).

Now, according to two sources familiar with the process and documents reviewed by High Country News and Public Domain, Trump and his team are following through on their promise to fast-track drilling in the NPRA by allowing new winter exploration and drilling to move forward without any kind of environmental review. The Department of the Interior is set to publish a “categorical exclusion” to the National Environmental Policy Act that would make it easier for the oil and gas industry to conduct seismic surveys, obtain rights of way and drill new exploration wells in the NPRA, an area that has become increasingly attractive to industry.

Seismic surveys, which are done with massive vibroseis trucks that weigh over 15 tons, can scar tundra and disturb wildlife, including female polar bears that den along the coastal region of the North Slope in winter and whose numbers have declined over the last two decades. Drilling and related infrastructure are also highly intrusive and, according to recent U.S. Geological Survey studies, have altered caribou behavior and Arctic migration patterns. The impacts of oil and gas development have been further complicated by rapidly warming conditions in the region, particularly thawing permafrost, which must be taken into account when operating on the North Slope.

But the Trump administration is stripping away existing environmental protections for nearly all stages of development. According to the sources, the categorical exclusion — tentatively titled “NPR-A Wintertime Oil and Gas Exploration Operations” — could be released as early as this week in order to facilitate seismic surveys and drilling over the winter. It was drafted without any public comment period or input from those in the region directly affected.

In an emailed statement, an Interior spokesperson confirmed that the department is working on a categorical exclusion, based on findings from “dozens of environmental reviews,” to speed up permitting for winter activity, including seismic surveys and exploratory drilling. According to the department, “These efforts are about using decades of experience and analysis to create a more efficient, predictable, and effective process while upholding environmental standards.”

The legal basis for a categorical exclusion is that the proposed activities will have “no significant impact” on the environment. Such exclusions are typically applied in places where the agency has determined there is little risk to natural resources. Jeremy Lieb, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group that has sued to block development in the NPRA, said that exploratory drilling and seismic testing have had well-documented impacts and are precisely the kind of actions that should be scrutinized by the land-management agency. The new rules, along with other changes being made by the administration, will effectively rubber-stamp industry operations in a remote and highly sensitive ecosystem.

“Drilling and seismic exploration for oil and gas in the Arctic are large-scale, industrial activities that cause significant, lasting negative impacts to the environment and nearby communities,” Lieb said in a written statement. “The administration cannot rely on a categorical exclusion to hide these projects from the public and avoid evaluating their environmental impacts.”

The 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve — the largest chunk of land managed by the Interior Department — provides important habitat to dozens of migratory bird species, denning polar bears and three distinct caribou herds, two of which have dramatically declined over the last decade. Under President Biden, a significant portion of the reserve was set aside for conservation purposes; the Interior Department was in the process of creating a roughly 1 million-acre caribou conservation area requested by the Native Village of Nuiqsut, which sits just to the east of the reserve and relies on the Teshekpuk Caribou herd as a significant food source. The agreement, signed just before Biden left office, would have imposed additional restrictions on drilling activity in the herd’s prime calving area. 

Former Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, who now heads up an environmental nonprofit, said the area around the village has been inundated with new drilling activity. She added that there’s evidence that the Teshekpuk herd’s migration patterns have already been impacted.

“All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books,” she said. “We feel that it doesn’t matter that we have a unique DNA, a small community of 500 people, that are just being totally disregarded and sacrificed for the greed of development.”

“All of the contractual agreements that were supposed to guide how development is going to occur have been ripped out of the books.”

Since Trump took office, Interior has scrapped the Biden-era regulations and canceled the caribou conservation initiative, instead prioritizing oil and gas development. Nuiqsut sued the department over its cancellation of the program and received a preliminary injunction in March. In May, after receiving a petition from the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA), a trade group that promotes drilling in the state and whose former CEO and president, Kara Moriarty, is now a senior advisor at Interior, the federal agency announced that it would begin “streamlining permitting for oil and gas infrastructure” in the NPRA. (Interior’s senior advisor for Alaska during Trump’s first term, Steve Wackowski, replaced Moriarty as head of AOGA.) 

This rule, effectively written by AOGA, would create a kind of blanket environmental impact statement that would apply to all oil and gas production sites in the NPRA, making it easier for industry to obtain approval for the construction of pipelines, gravel mines, access roads and related infrastructure. The new categorical exclusion appears to be focused on winter exploration activity — particularly seismic surveys — and follows recent guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality that underscored “the importance of CEs as a core feature of NEPA.”

The categorical exclusion is also being developed without any public input. Until recently, it was a legally required part of the process, but last April, the council relinquished its government-wide responsibility to oversee and implement NEPA, allowing federal agencies to forgo the 30-day public comment period.

Ted Boling, a partner at Ashurst Perkins Coie, who served as a member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 2000 to 2010 and during Trump’s first term, said this is largely uncharted territory for federal agencies. Given the size and complexity of the NPRA, he added, it could leave the forthcoming provision vulnerable to legal challenges.

“These (categorical exclusions) historically have been done if there’s a rulemaking procedure,” Boling said. “So, if they’re not going to get public comment on it, we’ll see how reliable it is.”

In a changing Arctic, how much noise is too much?

The elimination of standard environmental reviews for certain drilling-related activity comes as industry has acquired dozens of new leases in the NPRA — an area roughly the size of Indiana. During a lease sale held in March, nearly 200 parcels totaling more than 1.3 million acres were secured by oil and gas companies, including Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Much of the newly leased land is close to Conoco’s controversial Willow Project, which was approved during the Biden administration and includes infrastructure that will  facilitate future development. ExxonMobil’s new leases — just south of Teshekpuk Lake, the largest body of freshwater in Arctic Alaska — fall within the caribou conservation area.  

Matt Jackson, Alaska senior manager for The Wilderness Society, which is currently suing the Interior Department over its development plans in the NPRA, said that public lands in the Arctic are being “sacrificed for oil company profits.”

The NPRA was first set aside as a naval petroleum reserve in the early 1920s, but despite its name, it has seen remarkably little development over the years, with most oil and gas drilling on the North Slope occurring on state-owned land in and around Prudhoe Bay. In the last couple of decades, however, ConocoPhillips has gradually expanded its operations westward and into the reserve. A new discovery by wildcatter Bill Armstrong in 2013 renewed interest in the area, especially the formation in and around the Willow Project, spurring talk of a “North Slope renaissance.” In the recent NPRA lease sale, Armstrong’s company, North Slope Exploration LLC, acquired the highest number of tracts and will now seek to develop those leases, with minimal environmental oversight.

The proposed development poses increased risk to an already fragile and rapidly changing environment. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, which has led to widespread permafrost thaw, coastal erosion and unpredictable winter weather during which most of the drilling activity takes place.

This past January, after an unusually warm week, one of the drilling rigs deployed by ConocoPhillips — known as “the beast” because it is the largest rig on the North Slope — toppled over and caught fire as it was being moved along an ice road toward the Willow project.

Several employees were injured, and thousands of gallons of oil were spilled on the surrounding tundra. It took the operator four months to remove the rig and clean up the site.

Lieb, the attorney at Earthjustice, said the incident was a good reminder of the “scale of these projects and the kind of things that can go wrong.”

The post Arctic drilling in Alaska won’t get environmental review in new proposal appeared first on High Country News.

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