Some good ideas for letters to the editor & to Iow members of Congress.  Phyllis Mains  PS  Happy Holidays!
  
Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Ugliness oozes out of pro-drilling ranks

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Behind the smoke screen of its campaign to "save" Christmas, the right long ago found a backstage use for the Feast of the Nativity: relaxing environmental safeguards when no one is looking.

This Christmas, the dig it, drill it crowd is going after the biggest prize of all.

Using a vital defense appropriations bill, Republican Senate leaders are seeking to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The key votes will come early today.

A big liability exemption for the pharmaceutical industry is tucked into the bill. But the real battle is over the Arctic refuge.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has made strategy midnight clear: Use Congress' exhaustion and Christmas to carry the day.

"This is the endgame, OK, and I have been involved in endgames for a lot of years," the Senate's raging old bull told reporters. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm not leaving. I have canceled my trip home. I will be here through Christmas if necessary."

The House of Representatives caved in on Monday and passed the bill. A trio of Washington lawmakers who opposed refuge drilling -- Reps. Dave Reichert, Norm Dicks and Rick Larsen -- actually voted for it.

"They just had all the votes. They voted us down," said Dicks, who had tried to delete refuge drilling from the bill.

Asked if he has ever seen a like maneuver, the 29-year House veteran replied: "No. Never. This is really unbelievable. This is what happens when one party is in complete control."



Not quite.



A freshman Washington lawmaker, Sen. Maria Cantwell, has shown the guts to butt heads with Stevens, whether it comes to drilling rigs in the refuge or Stevens' bid to eviscerate protection of Puget Sound.

Cantwell is talking filibuster. So is Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., the Democratic Party's outspoken backer of the U.S. military mission in Iraq -- lately reviled by his party's left wing.

Republican leaders are holding a stick over heads of potential opponents. Hold up the defense bill, and we will blame you for leaving our troops in a lurch.

Such covering fire caused Dave Reichert to scurry for cover.

"We must support our troops. I will always put our troops first, always," said Reichert, a Republican who has made a big deal out of opposing ANWR drilling.

Lieberman is a wiser man made of sterner stuff.

"They expect because they've had the gall to put this on a bill that funds our men and women in uniform, that we will not have the nerve to fight something we think is wrong," he said. "Well, they're wrong."

Democrats offered to fund the Pentagon until the end of February under what Congress calls "a continuing resolution," allowing time for deliberation.

"Ted Stevens wouldn't allow it," Cantwell said.

The campaign to drill the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was on the cusp of success once before, in 1989, only to have the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef and oil 1,300 miles of Alaska's coastal beaches.

A key aspect, unusual in American history, has been slander directed at a natural place.

"It's empty, it's ugly," Stevens said of the coastal plain in October. "A flat white nothingness" is how Interior Secretary Gale Norton described it.

Stevens once characterized Gwich'in Athabaskan Indians, who depend on the Porcupine caribou herd for sustenance -- and oppose drilling the animals' calving grounds -- as "Canadian Indians who live in Alaska."

As one who's been there, let me tell you about our visit to the coastal plain on a 2001 raft trip.

We paddled into an eddy on the Canning River. A fox scuttled across the tundra. A golden plover squawked at us. We found her nest on the tundra and gave it a wide berth.

Caribou materialized out of a fog bank coming off the Beaufort Sea. They vanished, and then reappeared. The next day, I stropped to the top of a nearby bluff.

Twenty-four caribou crossed a stream just below me. Later, I awakened from a nap. Two caribou stood 20 to 30 feet upwind, sniffing for danger.

Back in camp, two musk oxen trundled between the tents and the cooking area.

Nothingness? Not on your life. Ugly? I'd use that term to characterize Sen. Stevens' methods.

Over 95 percent of the Alaska coastline is open to oil and gas drilling. Vast new territory has been opened to exploration in the National Petroleum Reserve west of Prudhoe Bay.

The oil industry insists it will leave a tiny "footprint," but the history of Prudhoe Bay suggests it will be a Bigfoot.

Prudhoe has nearly 4,000 wells and 500 miles of gravel roads. Its annual releases total 56,000 tons of nitrogen oxides and as much as 11 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Between 1996 and 1999, the pipeline and oil fields averaged about one small spill (mostly of diesel fuel) each day.

Noting predictions of output from ANWR-- from 2 to 5 percent of the nation's current daily oil consumption -- former President Carter makes an irrefutable argument.

"By driving more fuel-efficient cars, we can conserve more than the refuge would produce," he said in a 2001 interview. "Instead of tearing open the heart of our greatest wilderness, we can live wisely."

And therein lies the danger of refuge oil development, not just to critters but to all of us.

It simply perpetuates our country's addiction to fossil fuels. Americans are the ones who will really get drilled.

P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or [log in to unmask].
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