Inside the Biden administration’s fraught decision to green-light the controversial Willow Project

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.