It's actually much less than 48 days and every environmental organization
is trying to stop the drilling scheduled off the coast of the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. The following alert is from Center for
Biological Diversity.  Letters from Iowans who heard President Obama
promise no offshore drilling when he campaigned in Iowa and worked to get
him elected might get him to stop the drilling in the Arctic.  Won't know
unless we try to get letters from Iowans. The Wilderness Society has
gotten 50,000 letters so far.  Obama  needs to hear from Iowans whom he
claims helped him win the election.   Maybe we can prevent another
disaster.  From the gulf spill we know the oil company and the government
have been irresponsible and the destruction to wetlands and wildlife is
sickening.  Phyllis

Shell Oil Is 48 Days From Arctic Drilling -- Help Stop Next Disaster 

It's not only the one-month anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon
explosion -- it's also 48 days till Shell Oil starts its planned oil
exploration in the Arctic. This July, Shell plans to begin exploratory
oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska, which would harm and harass
endangered species like polar bears and ice seals -- as well as putting
the entire Arctic ecosystem at risk of an oil spill even worse than the
Gulf of Mexico disaster. The cold reality is that an Arctic spill could
be immeasurably worse than the current one because there's no way to
clean up a massive oil spill in the frozen, broken-ice conditions that
prevail in the Arctic for much of the year. In fact, the ice-free
drilling season is so short in the Arctic -- July to early October --
that leaking oil from an accident there like the one in the Gulf could
continue to gush for an entire winter while efforts to drill a relief
well had to be postponed.
Yet the Obama administration is allowing Shell's drilling to move forward
in little more than a month -- with no proper environmental analysis and
with the same technology used by BP in the Gulf. The Center for
Biological Diversity and allies sued to stop the drilling, but last week
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed our challenge. Immediately
afterward, we issued a formal statement vowing to continue our work to
stop Shell's dangerous project: "With 48 days to go before Shell is
slated to move forward, we will continue to press our request to the
Obama administration to re-evaluate its approval of the Shell drilling
plans in light of the Gulf spill, and to suspend drilling that we knew
was risky even before the massive failure in the Gulf once again exposed
that drilling is indeed a dirty and dangerous business."
Help us stop this ticking time bomb in the Arctic by sending a letter to
President Obama today urging him to rescind his decision to allow Shell's
drilling this summer. Read more about our case against Shell in the
Anchorage Daily News.

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