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Salazar says he would consider tapping oil in Alaska refuge (Associated Press, March 17, 2009)

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday he would consider tapping oil from Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by drilling outside its boundaries if it could be shown that the refuge's wildlife and environment would remain undisturbed. [ ...]

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has introduced legislation that would allow companies access to oil beneath the Arctic refuge's coastal plain through directional drilling from platforms outside the refuge itself. Murkowski contends such drilling would leave the refuge surface undisturbed.

MORE:
Ugh, Wilderness!: The horror of “ANWR,” the American elite’s favorite hellhole. (Jonah Goldberg, 3/18/05, National Review)

[B]efore you can appreciate what a small presence human beings have up here, you need to understand how mind-bogglingly huge — and devoid of people — Alaska really is. Alaska has a population not much greater than that of the nation's capital, but you could fit the District of Columbia into it more than 9,000 times. You could squeeze California into it almost four times; New York State, more than eleven times. A former Army Ranger who now works in Prudhoe Bay as a doctor put it to me this way: "We don't even bother trying to put out Connecticut-sized forest fires up here. Maybe we start to worry when they get to be the size of Virginia."

Over 60 percent of the official wilderness areas of the U.S. are in Alaska alone (which is one reason native Alaskans resent bureaucrats four time zones away who try to turn their state into a federally protected theme park). Anchorage, on the southern coast, is Alaska's biggest city, accounting all by itself for more than a third of the state's population.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is way over on the other side of Alaska, past several mountain ranges. ANWR is 19.6 million acres, about the size of South Carolina. And it's beautiful. Well, most of it is. But more about that in a moment. On the very northern cusp of ANWR is what is commonly called the coastal plain, a tract of flat tundra largely indistinguishable from other spots along the coast and throughout the region. This comprises about 8 percent of the refuge-but an even smaller fraction of its pretty scenery. Some of this area is already off-limits to oil exploration, permanently. Nonetheless, the U.S. Geological Survey — seconded by industry experts-believes there could be untold billions of barrels of oil in the swath still legally available. The oil industry says it would need to use only 2,000 acres-an area no bigger than Dulles Airport, outside D.C.-to get that oil. This footprint would be 50 times smaller than the Montana ranch owned by Ted Turner, who helps bankroll efforts to keep ANWR off-limits.

Why do affluent Ted Turner types oppose exploration? Well, there's a simple explanation and a complicated one. The simple one is that it could be bad for the Porcupine River caribou herd, the second smallest of the four major caribou herds that sometimes use the area to calve their young; in turn, a tribe of Indians called the Gwich'in claim this would destroy their way of life because they live off the Porcupine caribou (but nowhere near where the drilling would be). The more complicated explanation is that this is all a convenient and bogus cover for the simple fact that Americans generally — and environmentalists like Turner specifically — are more than a little daft when it comes to ANWR.

The most striking thing about this part of the world is how much meaning we impose on it. I don't even mean simply the ideological baggage of environmentalists or rank capitalists. Human beings impose meaning at the most basic level. Take, for example, something as mundane as the calendar. "Day" and "night" are total abstractions up here. When I arrived in Deadhorse, it was "early morning" according to my watch. But the reality is that the sun has not set into night, nor will it rise into a new day, for weeks.

The sun beats down on the North Slope more or less constantly for another month or two as the Northern Hemisphere eases itself into winter. When winter comes, there is no sunlight whatsoever for 56 straight days, and long after that, the sun is barely a momentary gift of orange and (later) yellow. If you wanted to set your clock ahead for daylight savings, you'd need to turn the big hand to "May."

In this sense the whole area is really just a Rorschach test for the imagination. There's little doubt that for much of human history most reasonable people would have considered this spot the definition of the word "godforsaken." You need not look back, for evidence, to the ancient pilgrims who died on the frozen tundra. You could simply read an old copy of the Washington Post from 14 years ago: "[T]hat part of the [ANWR] is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life."

Two decades have intervened, and an environmental fatwa has been issued declaring that the word "pristine" is synonymous with "beautiful" or "sacred."

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2009 5:55 AM