Drilling in Alaska’s national wildlife refuge makes no sense

FOR AMERICANS still cooped up by the covid-19 epidemic, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska is the stuff of dreams. On a recent rafting trip down the Hulahula river in the refuge Robert Thompson, an Inupiaq guide, saw 1,000 caribou and a dozen bears and wolves on tundra that stretched up into high mountain peaks under a big sky. On August 17th the US Department of the Interior released a plan to make 1.6m acres of the refuge’s coastal plain available for oil and gas exploration and development.