WASHINGTON, April 19 (UPI) -- On Thursday, supporters of oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge failed to muster sufficient votes in the U.S. Senate to move the issue forward. Does this mean that ANWR-drilling is dead? UPI National Political Analysts Peter Roff, a conservative, and Jim Chapin, a liberal, face off on opposite sides of this critical question.
Chapin: Good Riddance to a Bad Idea.
Rep. J.C. Watts Jr., R-Okla., chairman of the House Republican Conference, sent out a press release saying, "When Americans pay nearly two dollars a gallon for gas this summer, they should remember two words: Tom Daschle."
The source of Watts' ire was a 54-46 procedural defeat for the House-backed provision that would have permitted drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Watts went on to say that drilling in the ANWR would have brought 700,000 new jobs, an impressive number indeed, considering that the entire labor force in Alaska is less than half that number. Indeed, the total number of workers engaged in oil and gas extraction is less than half that number!
This must be some project!
Of course, the same Republicans tell us the same project will have no effect on the environment.
And then we come back to reality. Counting isn't a strong suit for Republicans. Every year of every administration of theirs for two decades they have come up with totally fictional estimates of how their non-balancing budgets will balance. And they've done their best to make it possible for their private-industry supporters to apply the same "new math" to their own operations -- look at Enron and Arthur Andersen, just to start with.
Their "jobs created" story is just one of the usual "job inflation" measures that are always used by sports teams to justify huge public subsidies for new stadiums.
What about the expensive gas? Oh, that's real. But it's coming whether or not ANWR happens, unless Watts has some magical method of extracting oil from ANWR that will reach gas pumps in three months, instead of that many years.
The Watts press release can be taken as a pre-emptive strike to try to blame Democrats for a Republican failure on energy -- a failure built on their love affair with the energy industry and with gas-guzzling cars, most recently expressed in a Senate vote against new mileage rules, combined with a strange slow-motion declaration of war on Iraq.
The failure to win even a majority of the Senate vote is more easily explainable. Five Democrats voted for drilling: two each from Hawaii and Louisiana, and the crypto-Republican Zell Miller of Georgia.
Eight Republicans broke with their own party. Four of the Republicans were "usual suspects," the two women from Maine, Lincoln Chaffee from Rhode Island, and the ever-more-liberal John McCain of Arizona. The other four were surprises of a sort: the Smith non-brothers from New Hampshire and Oregon, both of whom are up for re-election this year, and Michael DeWine of Ohio and Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, both of whom seem to have been moderating their voting patterns because of worries about future elections.
The Republicans were surprised that their newfound labor allies lobbying against the environmentalists didn't have more effect, but they shouldn't have been. The issue matters more to environmentalists than to labor, and senators knew it, just as they knew the opposite was true on their recent vote protecting sport utility vehicles.
Dwight Eisenhower established ANWR, back in the days when Republicans were still environmentalists.
There might be a time of peril when the need for this energy could override environmental concerns. That time isn't now,
To claim that using up the oil reserves of the United States faster, in order to keep giant civilian gas-guzzlers on the road now, would be a blow for "energy independence" is just plain crazy. Emptying our own reserves as fast as we can won't make us stronger, it will make us weaker.
After the vote, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said, "We've sent this misguided plan to the refinery." Let's leave it there.
Roff: It's time to tell the truth.
The administration proposal to explore for oil in the 1002 section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge makes a lot of sense.
Even the most pessimistic estimates say that there is a six-month supply of oil located under ANWR on the Alaskan North Slope.
Most commentators turn their nose up at the estimate, trying to persuade the country that six-months' supply is not very much.
What that means, however, is that all of the nation's oil needs could be produced out of ANWR for six months if necessary -- gasoline, petroleum products, crude oil, home heating, the works.
When you consider just how much oil-based energy the United States uses on a daily and yearly basis, a six-month supply is a heck of a lot of oil.
As a stopgap against oil shocks or to supplement U.S. supply, the ANWR oil would likely last for at least 50 years.
Of course, if that were to be widely understood, then it might make the project sound more appealing.
The sad truth is that the idea of drilling in Alaska has been demagogued to death. The radical environmental movement provides far too much money and far too much campaign-like activity for the benefit of the Democrats for them to allow drilling to move ahead.
These activists are anti-progress and anti-technology. They are the type of people who feel cold chills of excitement run down their spines when they read former Vice President Al Gore's call, in his book "Earth in the Balance," to eliminate the internal combustion engine by the second decade of the 21st century. They do not want America, or the world, to move forward economically or technologically.
And so they demonize the idea of drilling for oil on the northern Alaskan coast.
The ads they ran on television and in print, for example, showed ANWR as a beautiful place, full of mountains and trees and wild animals like caribou, which it is.
But these ads are also intellectually dishonest, because the 1002 section of ANWR, where the exploration would occur, is nothing like the Brooks Range and the other parts of ANWR the ads depict.
Section 1002 is flat, barren and snow-covered. It is not a pleasant place.
What the administration proposed was drilling sites that were self-contained units, connected to each other by ice roads -- not permanent ones -- that would not be there in the summertime -- when access would only come from the air.
Opponents of ANWR drilling set out to make the public believe, were the proposal to be approved, that the result would be smog-filled skies, oil-covered caribou, and an environmental catastrophe.
As the Senate vote shows, they have won this round.
It is not over. ANWR drilling makes economic sense and, frankly, environmental sense. Vast tracts of land that are locked up by the government, for some people to look at while on vacation, cannot be worked by others to raise their standard of living.
It is only when people own land, or can use it to make it productive, that they care for it in a responsible manner. The real environmentalists are the ones who respect the land and what can be done with it, not the ones who worship it.
