A bipartisan group of lawmakers reintroduced legislation Tuesday to permanently block drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as Republicans eye pushing new development in their party-line megabill.
The “Arctic Refuge Protection Act” is led by Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). It would designate ANWR as wilderness under the National Wilderness Preservation System, barring any new oil and gas leasing, exploration and development, while maintaining indigenous subsistence rights.
“There are some places too special and too amazing and too ecologically and culturally significant to allow them to be permanently despoiled by oil and gas,” Huffman, the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, said at a Capitol Hill press conference rolling out the bill.
“After all of these decades of being a political football, … we gotta permanently designate it as the wilderness that it is and permanently protect it as such.”
