Call it the Murkowski Inducement: tucked into the tax bill approved on Wednesday by Congress, amid the giveaways to “pass-through” businesses and to “master limited partnerships,” is a provision that opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The provision was added at the behest of Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, and, though it has nothing to do with tax policy and nearly had to be eliminated for parliamentary reasons, in the end it managed, stowaway-style, to cling to the legislation. The G.O.P. contends that the provision will raise more than a billion dollars over the next decade, but, like so many other claims about the legislation, this one is almost certainly fallacious. (An analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress put the figure at less than forty million dollars; this, as the authors note, is not even “enough to cover the costs of President Trump’s personal tax cut” resulting from the bill.)

What the provision will do, assuming that it’s ultimately allowed to take effect—and wilderness advocates have vowed to fight it—is destroy one of the nation’s last unspoiled places, a coastal plain that’s often called “America’s Serengeti.” “Alaska’s wilderness areas are truly this country’s crown jewels,” President Jimmy Carter said on the day he signed the bill that created the refuge, in late 1980.

The battle over ANWR (pronounced “an-war”) has been raging pretty much ever since that day. Congress designated most of the 19.6-million-acre refuge as wilderness, with almost no development allowed. But 1.5 million acres along the Arctic Ocean, east of Prudhoe Bay, known as the 10-02 area, were left in bureaucratic limbo, neither open to drilling nor off-limits to it. The 10-02 may or may not contain a lot of oil—estimates range widely—but it is clearly the ecological heart of the refuge, the summer breeding ground for two hundred thousand caribou and millions of migratory birds.

In the late nineteen-eighties, President Ronald Reagan tried to hand the 10-02 over to the oil industry, but Congress, then under Democratic control, resisted. In the mid-nineteen-nineties, a Republican-led Congress tried to open the 10-02, but President Bill Clinton vetoed the measure. The partisan wrangling continued through the Bush and Obama Administrations. It seems tragically fitting that it would come to an end in the Trump Administration, not just because Republicans now control both houses of Congress and the Presidency but because the one thing that the warring factions of the G.O.P. seem able to agree on these days—other than the further enrichment of the wealthy—is trashing the planet. “So it goes for the environment these days in Mr. Trump’s Washington,” the Times editorial board noted recently, under the headline “The Looting of America’s Public Lands.”

On the same day that Congress was voting to wreck ANWR, the Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency was “indefinitely” postponing a ban on most uses of three toxic chemicals. One of these is TCE, a solvent that is commonly used in dry cleaning and, according to the agency’s own analysis, “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure.”

What’s so depressing about the ANWR provision—besides the effect it will have on caribou, polar bears, grizzlies, and hundreds of other species—is that more oil infrastructure is exactly what the world in general, and the Arctic in particular, does not need. Owing to all the oil (and coal and natural gas) that has already been burned, the Arctic is now melting. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which apparently didn’t get the Trump memo that climate change is a “hoax,” issued its annual “report card” on the region. “The Arctic environmental system has reached a ‘new normal,’ ” it observed, characterized by “long-term losses” in sea ice, in snow cover, and in the mass of the Greenland ice sheet. The report called the losses “unprecedented in at least the last 1,500 years and likely much longer.”

“The changes that are happening in the Arctic will not stay in the Arctic,” Jeremy Mathis, the director of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program and one of the report’s authors, told scientists attending the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, in New Orleans last week. “These changes will impact all of our lives. They will mean living with more extreme weather events, paying higher food prices, and dealing with the impacts of climate refugees.”

As some commentators have pointed out, the G.O.P.’s demonstrably false claims about the tax bill are very much in keeping with its demonstrably false claims about climate change. In both cases, the Party is walking around with its proverbial fingers in its ears, pretending that ignoring the facts will make them go away. But, as John Adams observed, “Facts are stubborn things.” The world is warming; the sale of oil leases in ANWR won’t raise a billion dollars; the tax bill favors the rich. The only question that remains—and it is unfortunately the great question of our time—is whether voters will wake up to the G.O.P.’s charlatanism or whether American politics has also reached a “new normal,” one founded on a series of lies.

A previous version of this post misstated the location of the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting.