About two weeks before the Biden administration approved the Willow oil drilling project – slated to extract millions of barrels of oil from Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve – Interior Secretary Deb Haaland held a meeting with key environmental advocates and Indigenous groups that opposed the project.
Those constituents prevailed on her to reject the massive ConocoPhillips drilling venture. Haaland explained that the agency had to make difficult choices, much to the dismay of the people she was meeting with.
But she indicated she was personally not in favor of it — so much so that she got choked up about it, the sources said.
“It was evident physically how hard this position was for her to be in,” one source said.
After months of internal deliberations, the Biden administration officially greenlit the massive oil drilling project on Monday amid fierce pressure from the state’s congressional delegation and major pushback from environmental groups, the latter of which will now attempt to stop the project in court.
On Monday night, Haaland posted a video on Twitter calling Willow a “difficult and complex issue that was inherited” from the Trump administration, which originally approved a larger version of it in 2020.
For weeks, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre publicly insisted the final decision on Willow would be an “independent decision” made by Haaland and the Department of Interior. But multiple sources told CNN it was anything but.
Willow’s approval was largely a political and legal decision, they suggested – not a decision about the environment or climate crisis.
“We realized some time ago this was going to be a decision that was ultimately made at the White House level – not only by senior leaders, but actually with the president’s direct…
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