Posted: Sunday, December 25, 2005 10:00 pm
Once again the Senate has blocked oil exploration in a small fraction of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Apparently we don't need the oil that might be found there.
Actually, we might need it by the time exploration was done and production could start, which might be in 10 years or more. But reason has nothing to do with the Senate vote.
Maria Cantwell, the senator from Washington who led opposition to the drilling, said on TV she did not want to reward the oil companies. Reward the oil companies how? By allowing them to invest a billion dollars in exploration, on the chance they could get their money back and earn a profit?
Environmentalists oppose the drilling on the grounds that it would destroy an ecosystem. It would hardly do that, since the area to be explored covers only 1.5 million of the 19 million acres of the refuge.
And even there, if you follow the opponents' argument, the disruption would be short-lived. They say there is not enough oil there to warrant pumping it. If that's so, exploration will back up their claim and large-scale drilling will not take place.
The environmental argument has a flip side, one that Nigeria or Venezuela and all of OPEC might well apply one of these days. They might say to the United States: If you're not willing to accept even a little environmental degradation in a remote place, how do you expect us to keep pumping as fast as we can and wreck our own landscapes to satisfy your thirst for fuel?
Come to think of it, the reference to Venezuela suggests a way for the advocates of drilling to finally get their point across next time: Add a provision that any oil produced in ANWR will be used exclusively to lower the heating-oil bills of Americans, especially those in the Bronx. That is where the president of Venezuela is tweaking the nose of the Bush administration by making a deal with New York Democratic politicians and an oil company to provide cheap heating oil.
The Democrats don't mind disturbing the Venezuelan ecosystem for oil in order to make President Bush look bad. But when it comes to augmenting our domestic supply of petroleum, they can't bear the thought of Alaskan caribou having to walk around a drilling rig or two. (hh)