Bush Looks to Alaska again for Oil

[-Cp]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto...ap_on_go_pr_wh/second_term_energy_1&printer=1



Bush Looking Anew for Alaska Oil Drilling

41 minutes ago

BY H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Republican gains in the Senate could give President Bush (news - web sites) his best chance yet to achieve his No. 1 energy priority — opening an oil-rich but environmentally sensitive Alaska wildlife refuge to drilling.

If he is successful, it would be a stinging defeat for environmentalists and an energy triumph that eluded Bush his first four years in the White House. A broader agenda that includes reviving nuclear power, preventing blackouts and expanding oil and gas drilling in the Rockies will be more difficult to enact.

Republicans in the House and Senate said this week they plan to push for Alaska refuge drilling legislation early next year, and they predict success, given the 55-44-1 GOP Senate majority in the next Congress. Democrats and some environmental activists say continued protection of the refuge has never been as much in doubt.

"It's probably the best chance we've had," Rep. Richard Pombo (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., chairman of the House Resources Committee and a vocal drilling advocate, said in an interview.

Sen. Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record), R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he will press to open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as part of the government's budget deliberations early in 2005. That would enable drilling proponents to skirt an otherwise certain Democratic-led filibuster that would be difficult to overcome.

"With oil trading at nearly $50 a barrel, the case for ANWR is more compelling than ever," said Domenici. "We have the technology to develop oil without harming the environment and wildlife."

Bush is also expected in his second term to renew his call for action by Congress on a broader, largely pro-production, energy agenda — from easing rules for oil and gas drilling on federal land in the Rocky Mountains to expanding clean-coal technology and improving the reliability of the electricity grid.

New tax incentives to spur construction of next-generation nuclear power plants also will be back on the table after Democrats and some moderate Republicans scuttled it last year. Greater use of corn-based ethanol in gasoline also has wide support at the White House and in Congress.

Drilling in the Alaska refuge has been all but dismissed as unachievable since drilling opponents two years ago beat back a pro-development measure by a 52-48 vote. Bush did not make an issue of the refuge during the presidential campaign.

But with four new GOP senators expected to support ANWR drilling and the loss of a Republican moderate who opposed it, drilling advocates believe they now have at least 52 votes in the Senate, enough to get the measure through Congress as part of the budget process. By Senate rules, opponents of drilling cannot filibuster a budget measure. ANWR qualifies as a budget measure because it will generate income for the government from oil companies.

Environmentalists already are gearing up to wage an intense lobbying campaign to keep oil rigs out of the refuge's coastal plain, a breeding ground for caribou, home to polar bears and musk oxen and site of an annual influx of millions of migratory birds.

"This is as serious a threat to the refuge as any that has come before," said Jim Waltman of the National Wildlife Federation. "But the facts haven't changed. This is still a magnificent area and it can still be damaged by oil drilling."

But geologists believe 11 billion barrels of oil lie beneath the refuge's tundra and ice, and drilling supporters contend they can be tapped without damage to the environment or wildlife.

Regardless the outcome in the Alaska refuge dispute, the path to getting a comprehensive energy bill is likely to be full of potholes. Twice in the last four years lawmakers have agreed on 85 percent or more of an energy package only to see final action derailed over narrow, although intensely contentious, issues.

Some lawmakers, including Sen. Jeff Bingaman (news, bio, voting record) of New Mexico, senior Democrat on the energy committee that will write the legislation, argue that lawmakers should focus instead on passing separate bills on the most urgent and widely supported measures.

Some of that already has occurred, such as the recently approved loan guarantees for a proposed $20 billion natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 states.

Despite the GOP's new strength, Senate Democrats can still put the brakes on energy measures they strongly oppose through filibusters such as the one that blocked an energy bill in 2003. The issue then in dispute was liability protection for makers of the MTBE gasoline additives, which have been found to contaminate water systems.

However, given the stronger GOP majority, sustaining such filibusters may be more difficult.

 

[Zhukov]

What, precisely, currently prohibits companies from drilling in ANWR?

 

[freeandfun1]

What, precisely, currently prohibits companies from drilling in ANWR?

NWR = National Wildlife Reserve

Without government approval, nothing can be done there. The land is not privately held.

 

[-Cp]

I'd like to see them drill the livin' piss outta that land up there... then we could tell Cananda, South America and the Saudi's to go to hell..

 

[Zhukov]

NWR = National Wildlife Reserve

Without government approval, nothing can be done there. The land is not privately held.

Ok, that's what I thought. So can't the President, by executive order, just change that classification and auction the land off to the highest bidder?

 

[5stringJeff]

The President could sell off the land; it's probably easier to get permission to drill on it than to sell it.

And let's not kid ourselves. ANWR is not beautiful, pristine Alaskan forests like you see in the promotional video. The area they want to drill in is a frozen, mosquito-laden wasteland. Think the Sahara Desert with ice instead of sand. No one lives there except swarms of mosquitos; no one visits there except oil drillers, Eskimos (who, frankly, welcome the business), and caribou.

 

[NightTrain]

You're right on the money, Jeff.

ANWR is a barren, frozen tundra that looks nothing like what you see in a Greenie ad. Tundra for as far as the eye can see. There are Polar Bears and Caribou, and the current drilling rigs and the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline that runs coast-to-coast all exist peacefully. In fact, the caribou enjoy having that pipeline up on the North Slope so they have something to hide behind when it's 80 degrees below zero and the wind is howling at 60 MPH. In the spring there's millions of migratory birds that come up, but the current situation there hasn't bothered them a bit, either. It's hard to get across just how absolutely vast that area is.

The Greenies love that line, "Pristine Alaskan Wilderness" and show clips of Prince William Sound. The clear deception they run is sickening.

I think it's for this reason the Democrats and Greenies are generally looked down upon up here.. the vast majority of knuckleheads running around protesting drilling in ANWR have no friggin idea what they're protesting. We watch the commercials showing true Alaskan wilderness while they're talking about ANWR - no one in the rest of the country could be expected to know any different.

The Eskimos love having the North Slope running there; they've made millions from it.

With any luck, we can finally get that opened up. No, it won't solve all of the USA's energy problems, but it's one hell of a large step in the right direction.

 

[manu1959]

And let's not kid ourselves. ANWR is not beautiful, pristine Alaskan forests like you see in the promotional video. The area they want to drill in is a frozen, mosquito-laden wasteland. Think the Sahara Desert with ice instead of sand. No one lives there except swarms of mosquitos; no one visits there except oil drillers, Eskimos (who, frankly, welcome the business), and caribou.

you know...it is no wonder the dinosaurs died out.....frozen tundra.....deserts....not too smart those lizzards

 

[insein]

do you have any information on the subject jeff or NT? I'd like to take your word for it but i'd rather not fall into the "follower" category as the opposition has. I for one feel that it is neccessary to drill in ANWR. I have no idea what it is, who lives there etc. I just feel that we should exhaust all means neccessary to eliminate dependence on foreign nations for energy.

 

[5stringJeff]

do you have any information on the subject jeff or NT? I'd like to take your word for it but i'd rather not fall into the "follower" category as the opposition has. I for one feel that it is neccessary to drill in ANWR. I have no idea what it is, who lives there etc. I just feel that we should exhaust all means neccessary to eliminate dependence on foreign nations for energy.

National Review had a great article about it a couple of years ago. Not sure where to get web info though.

 

[fuzzykitten99]

do you have any information on the subject jeff or NT? I'd like to take your word for it but i'd rather not fall into the "follower" category as the opposition has. I for one feel that it is neccessary to drill in ANWR. I have no idea what it is, who lives there etc. I just feel that we should exhaust all means neccessary to eliminate dependence on foreign nations for energy.

Yes!
The area that they want to drill in makes up a WHOPPING 4% of the total area.

If it IS mosquito-laden, then ALL THE BETTER! The mosquito is considered our 2nd official state bird, but it isn't illegal to kill them, it's encouraged!

 

[rtwngAvngr]

NWR = National Wildlife Reserve

Without government approval, nothing can be done there. The land is not privately held.

I bet WalMart could get it done.

 

[dilloduck]

it always amazes me---"no blood for oil " yet "don't drill in ANWAR. Do these people realize that we still need oil until an alternative fuel source is a reality?----Hell, they don't even want us to build an more nuclear plants for electricty---obstructionist, pure and simple !

 

[NightTrain]

Don’t Book to ANWR
William F. Buckley, Jr.

Good, honest, fullthroated indignation is nice to come on every now and then, and here is a sample. The provocation was by President Jimmy Carter, writing in the New York Times. He was pleading against any oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR). What he said was, "The simple fact is, drilling is inherently incompatible with wilderness. The roar alone — of road building, trucks, drilling, and generators — would pollute the wild music of the Arctic, and be as out of place there as it would be in the heart of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon."

That really did it for Jonah Goldberg, who had recently returned from the area in Alaska about which Mr. Carter was being poetic. "This sort of distortion," he writes in the current issue of National Review (and references in the Goldberg File), "is rampant . . . Never mind that all of that harmless noise pollution would occur in pitch darkness, drowned out by a 120-degree-below-zero wind chill. Even Jimmy Carter should know that music is like trees falling in the forest: It's only music if there's somebody there to hear it."

It is a devastating picture that Mr. Goldberg brings back from his trip. The sum of his case is that prospective oil drilling in Alaska could be done without any damage to live sensibilities. What are the reasons for the offensive against it? Let him tell it: "There's a simple explanation and a complicated one. The simple one is that it could be bad for the Porcupine River caribou herd . . . The more complicated explanation is that this is all a convenient and bogus cover for the simple fact that Americans generally — and environmentalists like [Ted] Turner specifically — are more than a little daft when it comes to ANWR."

Goldberg begins his informative dispatch with some graphic figures. The oil development on the North Slope dots a huge area, roughly the size of Minnesota. But the work is done on a comparatively tiny archipelago of "parking-lot-sized islands of human activity in a boundless ocean of tundra."

To get a perspective: Alaska has a population about the size of the nation's capital. But you could squeeze California into Alaska almost four times. Those who fear that Alaska is neglected in the matter of federal wildlife preservation are reminded that 60 percent of the official wilderness areas of the United States are in Alaska. ANWR is way over on the northeastern side of the state, about the size of South Carolina. What the oil industry is asking for is access to 2,000 acres, an area no bigger than Dulles Airport. "This footprint would be 50 times smaller than the Montana ranch owned by Ted Turner, who helps bankroll efforts to keep ANWR off-limits."

Goldberg makes a shrewd point when he reminds us that life can be hypothetically grand, but in order to make the sentient appreciation of it real, you need to experience the beauty. I can speak of having experienced the beauty of the South Pole, but it helped, when I did that, that it was midsummer, that a large warm igloo waited for us with food and wine, and that the naval airplane that brought us there kept its engines running, lest they freeze shut while we lunched.

What you have in the ANWAR part of the world is not just beautiful mountains, but five-months' blackness in winter, and five months' perpetual sunshine in summer, when the melted ice has produced puddles in which the enemy breeds. "The water in an old tire can breed thousands of mosquitoes; a puddle in a junkyard, millions. ANWR is the Great Kingdom of the Mosquitoes." We are not talking about mosquitoes as mere nuisances. "On a bad day, according to the villagers in nearby Nuisquit, you can't open your mouth for fear of inhaling the mosquitoes."

Yes, there certainly is wildlife, though not even wolf packs can co-exist for very long with the mosquitoes. "Grizzly bears, like caribou, aren't frightened by oil exploration. They consider Deadhorse the Paris or New York of the North Slope; they come in to see the sights, perhaps grab a little dinner, even to catch a show. Everyone has a bear story; the owner of an air-charter service recounts to me how she came out of her office one day to find three bears sitting, expectantly, atop her car, as if she were late for the car pool."

Ah, the ideologization of nature. The Prudhoe Bay drilling has been done with the most fastidious attention to derivative effects. There is no hunting, not even fishing, tolerated. "I knew a guy who got fired for throwing a rock at a fox," one exasperated former ranger is quoted as saying. Speaking of Arctic foxes, most of them are rabid. The satisfaction taken by those who swear by the blessed virginity of ANWR is felt mostly by Americans who have not been deflowered by life there.

http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley072401.shtml

 

[NightTrain]

Big Oil, Caribou, and Greed
The debate over ANWR.
Jonah Goldberg

I had a long talk with Poppa Goldberg last night. Poppa G (no relation to Kenny) knows more about good column-writing than the Pope knows about midget basketball and fly-fishing, put together. But I guess that's not saying much. How about: My dad knows more about this stuff than Gandhi knew about rice cakes and non-binding clothes.

Anyway, Poppa G says my columns are getting a bit too formulaic: a joke in the beginning, some overly wordy serious stuff, then more jokes, and a smart-ass finish. Hey, when you think about it, that's a pretty apt description of the Clinton years.

So, starting Monday, we'll try to start mixing up the formula around here. But today, I have something very serious to talk to you about: Simple, Chronic Comsotosis — my word for bad doggy breath. No, that's not right.

Actually, what I want to talk to you about is my expense account. As very close readers of this column know, you get a severe headache when you sit too close to the computer screen. But they also know that I recently went to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I hung out with folks who know how to fix their own cars and have totally legitimate reasons to carry knives on their belts. I also got to see what Joe Lieberman called "one of the most beautiful, pristine places that the good Lord has created on Earth" and "one of God's most awesome creations."

This is a form of divine slander, like saying Ghostbusters II was some of Bill Murray's best work; it's unfair both to God and to the cooler stuff in the Almighty's oeuvre. But such declarations are also a con. When you watch the evening-news programs on ANWR, most of the time you see mountains and beautiful rivers and lakes and all that. But that's not where they want to drill for oil. In fact, they can't drill for oil in those places for two very straightforward reasons. First, there's no oil there. Second, it's against the law.

In fact, the only spot where it's legal to drill for oil is on what's called the coastal plain of ANWR, the snippet on the northern coast of the Refuge. You rarely see pictures of the coastal plain, because it's not what TV producers call a "beauty shot" (I know this hyper-technical TV lingo from my years as a producer). So, they show mountains and Disney animals and crystal-clear running water and say, "This is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the evil greasy snout-nosed Republicans want to gouge the planet for a thimbleful of oil."

But that's only true in the sense it's not an outright lie. Yes, the drilling would be in ANWR, but it wouldn't be where the beauty shots are. It's like doing an on-location report on New York City's urban blight and crime, but broadcasting from a café in Rockefeller Center. The coastal plain is, in fact, a vast tract of peat bog and mud puddles (sounds like a crime fighting duo: "Tune in this fall to see Pete Bog and his fast-talking streetwise sidekick Mudd Puddles, tackle evildoers. Tuesdays at 9.").

The coastal plain is a breeding ground for all sorts of awful flying critters. There are trillions of mosquitoes. There are these creatures called warble flies and nosebots, two bumblebee-like flies that cause the caribou unrelenting grief. I could swear I even saw Alan Dershowitz whiz past my ear.

Sure, it's possible to think this spot is beautiful. People find all sorts of things beautiful these days. In fact, a man sold a can of his own excrement at an auction for tens of thousands of dollars a few years back. If that's art, hell, then the coastal plain is Shangri-frickin'-La.

But the truth is that the beauty of the coastal plain isn't really in the eye of the beholder, it's in the imagination of the angst-ridden liberals who have never beheld the thing and never will. Pay attention to the debate over ANWR and a single word will come up more than any other (discounting definite articles like "a" and "the," which come up a lot in pretty much every debate). That word is "pristine."

I understand the appeal of pristineness; the idea that a place or a thing is precisely as God made it can be very compelling. But the key point is that it's an idea. There's nothing inherently beautiful about pristineness. But when I listen to opponents of oil exploration in ANWR I get the distinct impression that what they really mean isn't so much that ANWR is beautiful in itself, but that humans are ugly. In fact, I bet if you asked someone from Greenpeace if there were any place in the world that is devoid of humans and also ugly, they wouldn't be able to name one.

This is why there is no compromising on the anti side of this argument. The oil industry has made huge strides in oil exploration in the last few decades. The oil under the coastal plain could literally be extracted during the dead of winter — when it's night for 58 straight days and no caribou would be dumb enough to come within 500 miles of the Arctic Ocean — and all that would be left come spring would be a couple of Portosan-sized boxes (which the caribou would probably climb onto to catch a better wind and avoid the bugs that breed in their nostrils — I am not kidding).

But the environmentalists refuse to accept any concessions from the industry, because you can't be a little bit pregnant and you can't be a little bit pristine. It's like ANWR is a new car, and the second you drive it off the lot by poking a teeny-tiny hole in the ground, it's "used." The idea is ruined, even though the idea was false all along. The coastal plain isn't pristine — the Inupiat Eskimos, who support drilling in their homeland, have been offing the caribou up there for centuries.

What really drove home for me how much arbitrary abstraction is involved on the anti side of this debate were my efforts to get to ANWR in the first place. The tour I signed up for didn't bring me to ANWR. It brought me to the Alpine oil facility run by Phillips Petroleum in Prudhoe Bay, a couple of hundred miles from ANWR. At Alpine, by the way, the caribou are thriving despite twenty years of oil extraction with machinery far clunkier than the stuff that would be used in ANWR.

The problem for me was that I couldn't go all the way up to the top shelf of the planet to write an article about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge-without actually going there. The roughnecks and engineers thought I was a moron for insisting on seeing an area that looks exactly like the area around Prudhoe.

"Just look out the window. That's what ANWR looks like."

It didn't matter. I had to go because of a totally abstract journalistic convention that dictated that I go. So, I hired a small charter plane (which came with an emergency kit in the off chance that I got stuck out in the bush in bear country). We flew over to ANWR and guess what? Another endless ocean of puddles and tundra.

Now, here's the kicker. That plane was really expensive. And so was my hotel. In fact, the whole trip cost a lot more than we planned and the greedy oil companies aren't covering my freight. Which brings me back to the real issue: my expense account. We all know that copper wire was invented when someone tried to pry an extra penny out of the NR home office. Well, when the NR suits see my expenses it's gonna take the jaws of life to get full reimbursement.

That's where you come in. The full story of my trip to ANWR will not be posted on National Review Online — at all, ever. Cover stories of National Review OnDeadTree do not get posted on National Review Online. This is a matter of policy set by forces far more powerful than me; forces of bottomless, dark, unfathomable, nigh-upon-Stygian depth; forces which have been rumored to rhyme with Pitch Dowry.

Still, if you do not subscribe to NRODT, and you want to read the full, definitive story, you must purchase the magazine. Moreover, the rush to get a copy of this magazine must be so huge, so massive so as to create a jet stream that virtually snatches my reimbursement check out of the iron claws of the NR accounting office. Newsstands should be buried in confetti from the periodical-shredding dogfights over the last copy of the August 9 issue of National Review. Bookstore coffee houses should drown in a sea of spilt lattes.

For if there is not such a groundswell, if the ad revenues and newsstand sales do not surge like Alec Baldwin's skull after an overdose of Viagra, then there's no way the home office will ever approve my expense report and they will never send me anywhere else again. And if I cannot travel the globe as a peripatetic scribe in pursuit of truth and reimbursed alcohol consumption, then the hotel and airport bars which form the backbone of the American, nay, the global economy will shudder from my absence.
It's all riding on you.

Sorry, Dad.

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldbergprint072001.html

 

[NightTrain]

 

[NightTrain]

Here's some pics of the 'Pristine Alaskan Wilderness'. This first one is of existing facilities on the North Slope. Note that this terrain is the same as the following pictures of 1002 in ANWR.

 

[NightTrain]

From the ground

 

[NightTrain]

Is this what you all see when you see an Anti-drilling commercial from the Sierra Club wienies?

 

[NightTrain]

Pic of the Trans Alaskan Pipeline that runs from the North Slope to Valdez.