Summery of what we can expect this week on Arctic Drilling. Phyllis
Senate floor debate over the fiscal year 2007 budget resolution starts today with a floor battle expected this week over inclusion of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil drilling in the package.
The resolution approved in the Senate Budget Committee last week includes a $3 billion reconciliation instruction to the Senate's energy panel, which Chairman Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) intends to meet by authorizing oil and gas lease sales on the refuge's coastal plain.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) plans to offer an amendment to remove ANWR from the budget process. Last year, drilling supporters broke through with a razor-thin majority in the Senate in turning back a Cantwell amendment to strike a similar instruction from the fiscal 2006 resolution.
Advocates of leasing ANWR's 1.5 million acre coastal plain are using the budget process as a vehicle because budget measures cannot be filibustered. Supporters are well shy of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster on the issue.
Several story themes appear likely to resurface this week on the importance of developing new domestic supplies and the extent to which drilling will fragment and endanger the Arctic ecosystem. ANWR is estimated to contain 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
But there are also newer issues that bear watching as the floor fight looms, the "ANWR-only" reconciliation strategy in particular. This year the only reconciliation instruction in the budget is for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, compared to last year's budget that sought cuts to health entitlement and other mandatory spending programs.
Entitlement cuts would have proven even more controversial in an election year, so Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) left them out this year.
The House is not expected to take up the budget resolution until after the St. Patrick's Day recess, and it is not clear whether there will be an effort to cut mandatory spending or to what degree. Last year in the House, unified Democratic opposition to the entitlement cuts helped give GOP moderates leverage to force their leaders to jettison ANWR from their reconciliation package (E&E Daily, March 9).
Athan Manuel of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group says Gregg's decision not to include spending cuts could work against passage of the budget resolution. "When he did that, he transformed the budget into an Arctic drilling bill," said Manuel, who heads PIRG's ANWR effort. Last year, several moderate GOP senators who backed the effort to strip ANWR drilling eventually voted for the overall budget resolution, which narrowly passed.
A recent oil spill in Alaska could also shake up the debate. Alaska state officials last week estimated a Prudhoe Bay crude oil spill discovered this month was as much as 267,000 gallons, the largest on record on the North Slope. But it remains much less than the 11 millions gallons spilled by the Exxon Valdez when it ran aground in Prince William Sound in 1989.
Environmental groups call the spill proof that oil development would endanger ANWR. "Aging infrastructure, corroded pipes and failed leak-detection systems ensure that more big accidents like this are a matter of time, especially if Congress opens up the refuge," said Natalie Brandon, policy director for the Alaska Wilderness League, in a prepared statement following estimates of the spill's size last week.
Also worth watching is the effect of Interior Secretary Gale Norton's departure from the Cabinet. Last week, Norton announced she is leaving Interior at month's end, so the Bush administration's principal advocate of ANWR drilling has become a lame duck as the effort -- a multi-step process -- gets under way this year.
Whether this changes the congressional dynamic is not clear. While a key advocate has announced plans to leave, ANWR is largely a matter of inside congressional machinations, and also comes as the administration's political force on the Hill appears to be shrinking.
Most positions on the issue are also firm at this point. Drilling backers broke through in the Senate last year not as a result of changed minds but because several freshman senators in the 109th Congress in favor of developing the refuge replaced members who opposed it. "It really comes down to just a couple of votes in Congress as opposed to anything the administration is or is not doing," said John Bisney, spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute.
Manuel calls the departure a recognition that "last year was their best chance to open it up."
Votes on amendments to the $2.8 trillion budget package are expected to begin in the middle of the week. A number of steps are needed before leasing could be allowed.
It requires a final budget resolution deal between the chambers that contains reconciliation instructions paving the way for development, and then actual leasing authorization through the subsequent budget reconciliation process, with the congressional landscape quite uncertain.
It remains unclear how large the differences between the two chambers' budget resolutions will be. "I would expect the House to at least make a push for entitlement reforms within their budget resolution," said Brian Riedl, a budget expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Looking further ahead, if there is to be a House-Senate budget deal this year, Riedl said predicting the content is difficult. "Generally, Congress is able to come up with a conferenced budget resolution, and I would not expect them to fail this year," he said. "What is in it is anybody's guess."