This past Monday, the United States government gave the green light for the Willow Project, a controversial oil and gas development proposal in Alaska. The project, spearheaded by ConocoPhillips, aims to extract up to 600 million barrels of oil and 3.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), a 23 million-acre area on the North Slope of Alaska.