Today, the Bureau of Land Management held a lease sale that sold over a half-million acres of land in the iconic and pristine coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These acres were contained within 11 tracts, among a total of 22 tracts offered for sale.

This lease sale, which conveys potential property rights on federally owned land, collected a grand total of $14.4 million. Drilling in the coastal plain would permanently destroy a landscape that is one of the few remaining untouched and undisturbed vast ecosystems in our country, for $26 an acre.

The American people were promised that the sale of the Arctic NWR coastal plain would bring in several billion dollars. For years, conservation partners have said this figure was wildly inflated, and today we were proved correct: this lease sale has generated less than one percent of the revenue promised by the 2017 Tax Act!

We didn’t believe it was worth billions of dollars to drill on the Arctic National Wildlife refuge -- we definitely don’t believe $14 million dollars should allow the desecration of this sacred place.

We call on President-elect Biden to reverse these actions to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as one of his first actions as President of the United States.