Not this oil
NATURE'S DESTRUCTION of the Gulf Coast should not lead to human destruction of Alaska's Arctic Coast, but that could be one result of Hurricane Katrina when Congress returns from its summer recess this week.
The challenge that defenders of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have faced to protect it from oil drilling will likely become even more difficult when drilling advocates point to the damage the petroleum industry has suffered around New Orleans, pushing gasoline prices to $3 a gallon. Never mind that it will take at least 10 years for any oil to flow from ANWR, or that much greater amounts of oil could be saved sooner simply by requiring the auto industry to use available technology to improve fuel efficiency.
The vote on the wildlife refuge will come when Congress considers a bill to reconcile its spending actions with sources of revenue. The lawmakers will be counting on $2.4 billion in revenues from drilling leases in ANWR over the next five years. Like the budget resolution last spring that also included this expectation of revenues, the reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Proponents of drilling are using the reconciliation bill to win approval for ANWR drilling because they know that in the Senate they could not muster the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster on a regular bill authorizing drilling.
The industry already has at its disposal 95 percent of the Arctic coastal plain. The refuge is a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, snow geese, and wolves. The oil and natural gas industry want to interlace it with hundred of miles of roads and pipelines. The roads and air strips required by the industry would result in immense amounts of gravel being stripped from the refuge's streambeds. These are the migratory destination for millions of birds, many of them from as far as South America.
All of this degradation would be in the service of oil production that, at its peak, would never amount to more than 2 percent of US demand. According to the Bush administration's own Energy Information Administration, ANWR's potential role in the US petroleum picture is so small that by 2025 it would reduce US reliance on imports only from 68 percent to 65 percent.
The industry wants an open door in ANWR because it knows, to paraphrase the song about New York, that if it can drill there it can drill anywhere. New England Republican conservationists such as Representatives Charles Bass and Jeb Bradley of New Hampshire, Nancy Johnson and Christopher Shays of Connecticut, and Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine should join with like-minded Democrats in rejecting this assault on a corner of America that should not have to suffer for what happened in the Gulf of Mexico.
