Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, says construction for the Willow oil project will create 2,500 jobs in the state. But these jobs will likely go to white men, some from outside Alaska, while Native Americans and Alaska Natives experience poverty levels that are double the state average. It is just one of many problems with the Willow project, an $8 billion ConocoPhillips plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal land, Joshua Hunt argues in Scientific American. Hunt remembers watching the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill unfold as a child – patches of oil still linger beneath the surface of some Alaskan beaches. By approving the Willow project, Biden joins a long line of US presidents making unnecessary concessions to an oil industry that is well aware its profits are tied “to our collective climate doom”.
Photograph Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images