Gov. Joe Lombardo (R-NV) blasted President Joe Biden on Tuesday for locking up 500,000 acres of mineral-rich land in Nevada and Texas. He said the move would be tough on Nevadans for generations.

Lombardo said the White House did not respond to any of his concerns before the announcement of the 506,000-acre Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in southern Nevada. Lombardo said his office reached out.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday officially designated a new national monument in Southern Nevada while speaking at a conservation event at the Interior Department.

At more than 506,000 acres, the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument is one of the largest tracts of land to come under federal protection so far during Biden’s presidency, preserving Nevada’s Spirit Mountain and the desert around it.

“It’s a place of reverence, a place of spirituality, a place of healing,” Biden said Tuesday. “It will now be recognized for the significance it holds and be preserved forever.”

As he campaigned for president in 2020, Joe Biden responded to a New Hampshire town hall question unequivocally, adding repetition for emphasis.

"No more drilling on federal lands," he said Feb. 9, 2020. "Period. Period. Period. Period."

Biden repeated his stance a month later, saying at a presidential primary debate: "No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends." 

The Biden administration is approving the controversial major Willow oil project on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope, according to two people familiar with the decision.

The decision being announced Monday is one of President Joe Biden’s most consequential climate choices and is likely to draw condemnation from environmentalists who say it flies in the face of the Democratic president’s pledges.

As elected Iñupiat leaders and lifelong residents of Alaska’s North Slope, we are fiercely proud of our ancestors and their quest for self-determination. Despite living in the most extreme climate in the United States, the Iñupiat have sustained our communities while staying true to our cultural values and traditional subsistence way of living.

Yet when it comes to Alaska’s proposed Willow Project, the voices of the people whose ancestral homeland is most impacted have largely been ignored.

President Joe Biden is weighing whether to approve a massive oil and gas drilling project in Alaska that has the bipartisan backing of the state’s congressional delegation but is drawing fierce opposition from environmental groups. A decision is expected to come sometime this week.

The uproar concerns what’s known as the Willow Project – the largest pending oil and gas project in the U.S. – which is a proposal by ConocoPhillips to develop energy resources in a small portion of what’s known as the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska on Alaska’s North Slope.

The Biden administration is expected to make a decision soon on whether to approve the controversial Willow Project in Alaska.

ConocoPhillips’ massive Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope has been moving through the administration’s approval process for months, galvanizing a sudden uprising of online activism against it, including more than one million letters written to the White House in protest of the project, and a Change.org petition with more than 2.9 million signatures.

Here’s what to know about the Willow Project.

"Clean energy" seems irresistible. Could you oppose energy that doesn’t pollute?

But the term’s imprecision leaves it open to interpretation — and sometimes manipulation.

Wind and solar are "clean," right? 

But is natural gas clean — or at least less dirty?

Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, a group backed by the natural gas industry, is trying to sway public opinion, particularly among Democrats. The group doesn’t call natural gas "clean energy," but casts it as a companion.

President Joe Biden’s administration on Wednesday recommended a scaled-down version of a major oil drilling project in the North Slope of Alaska, taking a step toward approving the $8 billion Willow plan that climate groups have long condemned.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management released an environmental analysis that proposes lowering the number of drilling sites from five to three under the project, which is led by ConocoPhillips, Alaska’s largest crude oil producer.

The Biden administration proposed a drilling plan in Alaska that is a scaled-back version of the original plan proposed under the Trump administration, according to a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) statement.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) endorsed a scaled-back version of the ConocoPhillips (CP) drilling plan in Alaska, according to an environmental impact statement released by BLM Wednesday. The plan would allow CP to drill at just three sites with consideration deferred on a fourth, instead of the original five which CP had initially sought.