Oil major BP played a key role in lobbying the Trump administration to allow oil and gas drilling in two previously protected areas of the Alaskan Arctic, Unearthed can reveal.

Opening up the areas to exploration poses significant risks to the environment and will undermine efforts to meet the Paris climate targets to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Writing to Trump administration officials, the company first lobbied for more areas to be opened up to drilling off the US coast and then welcomed plans to lease swathes of the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea for oil and gas exploration, according to documents seen by Unearthed.

BP also backed the Trump administration’s move to begin oil and gas leasing within a highly sensitive area of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite the threat this poses to the way of life of the Gwich’in people, who have lived in the region for thousands of years.

Both moves followed intense lobbying by Alaskan politicians and powerful BP-funded trade associations, including the Alaska Oil & Gas Association (AOGA) and the Resource Development Council for Alaska (RDC).

Our elders have said that if they go, we go

BP holds senior leadership positions at both organisations; the president of its Alaska business, Janet Weiss, sits on the board of AOGA, while its vice president of external affairs for Alaska, Wendy Lindskoog, sits on the RDC’s executive committee, giving the company oversight of both group’s lobbying efforts.

The high-level lobbying was accompanied by a major social media push backed by another BP-funded industry group. Targeted Facebook posts – which did not mention their oil industry sponsors – urged Trump supporters to write to the federal government in support of opening up the Arctic Refuge, claiming it would have “minimal environmental impact”.

Climate impact

The news comes after a report released by the campaign group Global Witness found that any investment in new oil and gas fields will be incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

BP has justified investment in new fields, including in the Arctic, based on its controversial projections that oil and gas demand will remain steady over the coming decades, likely jeopardising efforts to limit climate change.

The findings are part of a wider investigation by Unearthed into BP and other international oil companies’ opposition to global climate and environmental legislation.

In March, Unearthed and the Financial Times revealed that BP had successfully lobbied the Trump administration to roll back key climate regulations that underpinned the US contribution to the Paris climate agreement, despite claiming to support the deal.