U.S. Senate rejects the latest Republican plot to open the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling

Some good news for a change from the oth­er Wash­ing­ton today: The U.S. Sen­ate has resound­ing­ly reject­ed the lat­est Repub­li­can plot to open the Arc­tic Refuge’s Coastal Plain to oil drilling, defeat­ing an amend­ment offered by Pat Roberts of Kansas intend­ed to allow big oil com­pa­nies like Shell or BP to begin despoil­ing one of our nation’s great­est nation­al wonders.

The amend­ment, to Sen­ate Bill 1813, need­ed six­ty votes to pass; it received only forty-one, with fifty-sev­en sen­a­tors vot­ing no and two sen­a­tors not voting.

Sev­er­al Repub­li­cans joined most Democ­rats in vot­ing no; three Democ­rats joined the remain­der of the Repub­li­cans in vot­ing yes.

The Repub­li­cans who vot­ed against drilling were Scott Brown, Bob Cork­er, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Mar­co Rubio. Democ­rats who vot­ed for drilling were Mark Begich (of Alas­ka), Claire McCaskill,and Joe Manchin.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, Big Oil’s favorite Demo­c­rat, Mary Lan­drieu, vot­ed no on the amend­ment — per­haps she was lob­bied to cast a sen­si­ble “no” vote by her good friend Maria Cantwell, who has been in the van­guard of fights to pro­tect the Arc­tic Refuge in our nation’s capital.

The Pacif­ic North­west­’s del­e­ga­tion vot­ed as follows:

AYE on the amend­ment (for drilling): Mark Begich, Lisa Murkows­ki (Alas­ka); Mike Crapo, Jim Risch (Ida­ho)

NAY on the amend­ment (opposed to drilling): Maria Cantwell, Pat­ty Mur­ray (Wash­ing­ton); Jeff Merkley, Ron Wyden (Ore­gon); Jon Tester, Max Bau­cus (Mon­tana)

Sen­a­tor Cantwell’s office has not yet issued a state­ment on the vote. We’ll be in touch with her staff tomor­row to get her reac­tion, and will update this post accord­ing­ly. We’ll also check in with our friends at the Alas­ka Wilder­ness League to see if they have any comment.

Last week, the Sen­ate defeat­ed anoth­er bad amend­ment aimed at allow­ing Tran­sCana­da to build its pro­posed Key­stone XL pipeline with­out hav­ing to under­go envi­ron­men­tal review and pub­lic scruti­ny. That amend­ment, offered by John Hoeven, received the unan­i­mous sup­port of Sen­ate Repub­li­cans, plus a hand­ful of Democ­rats, but it still failed because it did not reach the six­ty-vote threshold.

After Hoeven’s amend­ment failed, 350.org founder Bill McK­ibben con­grat­u­lat­ed the forty-two Sen­ate Democ­rats who stood up to the oil indus­try and warned that the bat­tle to stop Key­stone XL is far from over.

“Today’s vote was a tem­po­rary vic­to­ry and there’s no guar­an­tee that it holds for the long run,” he said. “But giv­en that this thing was a ‘no brain­er’ a year ago, it’s pret­ty remark­able that peo­ple pow­er was able to keep work­ing, even in the oil-soaked Sen­ate. We’re grate­ful to the Admin­is­tra­tion for deny­ing the per­mit and for Sen­ate lead­er­ship for hold­ing the line.”

“The rea­son this fight has been so hard is because of the finan­cial pow­er of the fos­sil fuel indus­try, so that’s what we’re going after now,” McK­ibben added. “We’ve been play­ing defense for months, now we’ve got to quick­ly go on offense. Going for­ward, we’ll be work­ing with the huge majori­ties of Amer­i­cans who want to end sub­si­dies to the fos­sil fuel indus­try. We’ve learned a lot, not all of it savory, about how the polit­i­cal process works, and we’re going to put that to use.”

We at NPI strong­ly believe that more drilling is not the answer to our ener­gy secu­ri­ty prob­lem. That’s why we oppose the con­struc­tion of the Key­stone XL pipeline as well as risky onshore and off­shore drilling schemes, espe­cial­ly in pro­tect­ed areas like the Arc­tic Refuge.

We need to be invest­ing in renew­able ener­gy alter­na­tives, devel­op­ing a a smarter elec­tric grid, and step­ping up con­ser­va­tion — not per­pet­u­at­ing our fos­sil fuel addic­tion. Extract­ing and burn­ing hydro­car­bons wors­ens air qual­i­ty, cre­ates more pol­lu­tion, and makes the cli­mate cri­sis worse. We’ve known for a long time that fos­sil fuels are dirty and finite. Yet the indus­try that extracts and sells them con­tin­ues to dic­tate our nation’s ener­gy pol­i­cy. It’s time for that to change.