Dear Alaska activists from Iowa,

Please read the letter copied below that will be sent to Representative Jim Nussle, who’s the chair of the House Budget Committee and will be chairman of the upcoming House-Senate conference to produce a final budget bill.

There are two very simple requests:

1)       Please respond to me with your name and city if you’d like your name added to this letter to Congressman Nussle.

2)       Forward to your group’s membership, and any friends, family, colleagues who you feel would also add their names to the letter.

Other ideas to get more names:

• If you know people who don’t have access to email but would still like to add their name, simply email me their information and I’ll get them on the letter. 
• You could also print a copy of the letter and use it like a petition (maybe at Earth Day events this week?).  Collect the name/city for all signatories and email to me.

Scott Hed

Plains & Prairie Organizer

Alaska Coalition

231 S. Phillips Avenue, # 361

Sioux Falls, SD  57104

(605) 336-6738 office

(605) 351-1646 cell

(270) 747-5520 fax

[log in to unmask]

www.alaskacoalition.org

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 19, 2005

Dear Chairman Nussle,

Thank you for your past opposition to including speculative revenues from oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the budget.   We strongly urge you to OPPOSE any proposed  FY 2006 Budget Resolution agreement that contains either the explicit assumption of revenues from oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or reconciliation instructions to the House Resources Committee that would ultimately include revenues and allow oil drilling there.  

We agreed with you when you told Iowans that your House budget resolution does not assume revenues from Arctic leasing, and your indication that this issue has no place in the budget process.  However, in the House-Senate conference, Senators Gregg and Domenici are likely to pressure you to compromise and include speculative revenues in the budget. 

If the final budget resolution includes any compromise or reconciliation instructions, it would explicitly or implicitly facilitate the use of speculative revenues from oil drilling in the Arctic in the final budget.  The fate of the Arctic Refuge should be determined by a full, fair and open debate, not through an arcane, back door process that was never intended for major energy or environmental policy decisions.

Drilling in the Arctic Refuge will do little to address our country’s energy or fiscal needs. In fact, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that if oil were found beneath the coastal plain, it would amount to less oil than what the U.S. consumes in a single year. And oil company executives told Congress that it would take ten years to produce any oil.

Any revenues included from drilling are purely speculative, so assuming them in the budget falsely reduces the size of the deficit.  To reach the revenues assumed by drilling proponents, oil companies would have to lease every single acre of the 1.5-million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, and pay over 50 times more per acre than the average leases on federal or state lands elsewhere on Alaska’s North Slope. 

In fact, the two largest oil companies in Alaska, including BP and Conoco/Phillips seem uninterested in drilling in the Arctic Refuge, and have withdrawn their support from the lobby group pushing to open it to drilling.

We urge you to maintain an honest budget by publicly opposing any compromise that includes Arctic drilling revenues in the final budget or reconciliation instructions to the House Resources Committee.  With your help, we can continue to safeguard the crown jewel of America’s natural resources and advance faster, cheaper, cleaner energy solutions like bio-fuels produced right here in Iowa.

Sincerely,