President Obama told Americans on Sunday that Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is too precious to allow oil and gas drilling, but has Obama ever spent time in the state?
Obama has only been to Alaska three times during his presidency, but those three visits were short, and essentially a refueling stop for Air Force One. Now he’s being criticized by Republicans for using Alaska to refuel his plane, but not allowing residents and native tribes to drill in their own state.
“All three times [Obama visited], it was basically to get fuel,” said Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, adding that two of the times “were in the middle of the night, for as long as it took to get fuel.”
“Outside of this short meet and greet, outside of this bargaining chip to gain support from national constituencies, he’s basically viewing Alaska as a refueling stop. Which is no shortage of irony here in the fact that he’s happy to refuel Air Force One in Alaska, he doesn’t seem to want the fuel produced in Alaska,” Murkowski said.
When Obama stopped in Alaska in 2009 to refuel Air Force One on his way to Japan, he spoke to troops at Elmendorf Air Force Base while Air Force One was refueled. Before his presidency, Obama had never visited the Last Frontier.
On Sunday, Obama said he would ask Congress to designate virtually all of ANWR as wilderness, meaning the region would be put off-limits to activities like oil and natural gas drilling. This designation would include the 1.5 million acre coastal plain, where most of the oil is located.
“Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge is an incredible place — pristine, undisturbed. It supports caribou and polar bears, all manner of marine life, countless species of birds and fish, and for centuries it supported many Alaska Native communities. But it’s very fragile,” Obama said in a White House-produced video.
But not all natives were happy about his decision, including the only U.S. lawmaker from ANWR, who lambasted Obama’s decision.
“We have thousands and thousands of acres of land that our people in the state of Alaska, especially in ANWR, have title to and [they] cannot even use that resource to enrich themselves,” said Alaska State Rep. Benjamin Nageak, a Democrat.
“That is wrong,” said Nageak, who represents the town of Barrow on Alaska’s North Slope. “When you give the people the ability to enrich themselves you don’t lock up their lands so they don’t do anything else but just sit on it and nothing comes out of it except the renewable resources that we depend on. That to me is wrong.”
Obama was also criticized in the media for filming an anti-oil drilling video while he was aboard Air Force One — a plane that runs on petroleum.
“In my mind, that’s not visiting Alaska, that’s not trying to understand who we are,” Murkowski said. “We’ve got some pretty beautiful, wide-open skies, but when you’re flying 35-40,000 feet looking down that’s not how you get a view of Alaska.”
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