April 2005
The Great Alaskan Shootout
Defining the oil and energy issues
By Coonoor Behal
Queen City Forum Magazine staff writer
Early in 2001, then-Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska stood on the Senate floor holding up a blank sheet of white paper. His message was clear: this is all there is to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s [ANWR] coastal plain – a crystalline desert, a frigid void, a white-washed nothingness on the outer edges of U.S. soil. Though there has been much debate over the past 25 years as to the value of the refuge in its untouched natural state, it is now very clear there is much more at stake in the battle for ANWR than the current governor’s translucent 8x11 sheet of could ever indicate.
Striking a New Balance
The ideological quarrel between free market enterprise and environmental preservation has usually yielded political victories for the environmental lobby concerned about tarnishing America’s last sliver of wilderness. Ever since the Carter Administration doubled the size of the refuge to its current 19 million acres in 1980, pro-drilling Congressmen and women have sought to exploit the political compromise tucked within that same legislation; a small slice of ANWR could be opened for oil exploration if both houses approved it. Filibuster threats were often used to derail largely Republican attempts at pro-drilling legislation. A first strong attempt made by the Senate Energy Committee was halted when the Exxon Valdez disaster spilled over 10 million gallons of oil, polluting more than 1,000 miles of Alaskan shoreline. Six years later a budget finally approved by both houses, which included revenue from drilling, was stopped only by a Clinton veto. In 2003, a closely divided Senate with only 51 Republicans was again prevented from joining forces with their more decisively pro-oil House colleagues.
Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH) visiting Lake Erie coastal marsh. He secured $2 million to protect the land from development.
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The relative balance between Big Oil and Big Sky was finally tipped on March 16 when the Senate voted 51 to 49 in favor of a budget that assumes $5 billion in revenues garnered specifically from ANWR drilling leasing fees.
Prospects for Leasing
Given the longevity of the issue’s presence and the oil lobby’s long-established strength in Washington, it is ironic the current Republican majority and their success in opening up ANWR comes at a time when Big Oil’s interest in domestic drilling seems to be waning. Oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips recently withdrew from the high-profile lobby group Arctic Power, claiming their continued involvement would be ineffective.
The Center for Responsive Politics reports political contributions from oil and gas interests now represent a much smaller portion of total campaign giving than ever. In the 1990 election cycle oil interests ranked eighth of all donating industries; for 2004 Big Oil ranked number 17, though a higher percentage was gifted to Republican candidates (www.opensecrets.org). This downward trend may be more reflective of business savvy than political power shifts considering 95 percent of Alaska’s coastline (ostensibly the best and last chance the US has of finding a domestic supply) is already open for oil exploration; the remaining 2,000 square miles in the north of the “American Serengeti” may not be worth the political contributions or the financial risk that comes with leasing its as-yet unproven oil fields. Some anti-drilling advocates see this as a resignation to the realities of the nation’s current energy crisis. “Even the oil companies know that America’s energy future does not lie in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said in a statement released by the organization the day of the Senate vote. |
Oil Speculations
But the realities of the crisis and how drilling in ANWR can help make the country oil-independent are almost as murky as Gov. Murkowski’s Office Depot metaphor, itself using a product of environmental destruction. The anticipated $5 billion in revenue from leasing opportunities in the next decade may not be as lucrative if the oil companies’ avowed commitment is not as strong as it once was. But with the current world price of oil at $56 a barrel, any opportunity to find new reserves under politically stable soil is attractive. Further, there are wildly varying figures as to exactly how much oil lies beneath the tundra of those 2,000 acres. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates range from 5 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil, with the most likely amount being 10.3 billion. This is an amount President Bush and last week’s majority vote believe can help solve the energy crisis at home by making the country less dependent on foreign sources of oil. “This is a way to get some additional reserves here at home on the books,” the president has said.
Even if the oil found approaches the upper limit predicted, advocates on both sides of the issue admit the drilling could translate into only a six month oil supply for the U.S. economy, which currently consumes 20 million barrels a day. Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (the governor’s daughter and hand-picked successor) claims oil extracted from ANWR could make America completely independent of Saudi oil for 25 years. There are greatly differing testimonies as to how minimal the impact of oil exploration can actually be on the environment and its wildlife. Also apparently at odds with the immediacy of the looming oil shortage is the fact that drilling, provided the debate lives through several more rounds of required Congressional go-aheads, would take place in 2007 at the earliest; daily production would not peak until 2025. Such speculative projections color the overall debate as to whether drilling or conservation is the best way for the country to achieve energy independence.
Marilyn Wall, Conservation Chair for the Ohio Chapter Sierra Club, explains the he said-she said timbre of the debate in this way: “The influence of money [from multinational oil companies] is just overwhelming in the Congress right now and so there are a lot of unknowns. A lot of it is the philosophy behind deregulation that oil companies should be allowed to drill anywhere.”
Black Oil, Grey Politics
The simplicity of Murkowski’s 2001 demonstration also veils the fascinating party politics behind the vote and the opposing ideologies that have guided political allegiances to one side or the other. In each attempt to pass drilling legislation, there have been defectors from each party. Last week, Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine was one of seven Republicans who strayed from traditional party opinion on the ANWR issue. Ms. Wall cites Sen. DeWine’s long-standing commitment to protecting and preserving natural wildlife areas, specifically his attempts to have Darby Creeks (located south of Columbus) protected with national wildlife refuge status. Ohio also stands to gain from potential future involvement with technologies supporting clean and renewable energy sources. “Ohio is an industrial state with years of experience and infrastructure to support industry. It is in a good position to be a leader in newer energy sources and development opportunities to bring products to market and can put itself in the forefront [of such efforts] with its many universities and research abilities,” Wall says.
California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer couched her objections to arctic drilling in unusually religious terms, using pictures of the endangered wildlife as evidence that the refuge “is a God-given environment.” Not only is the political line being transcended and blurred on this issue, but the ideological frameworks being used are increasingly being borrowed from the opposition party.
Sen. DeWine was not the only one to cross party lines in the name of an individual state’s interests. But Hawaiian Democratic Sen. Dan Inouye and Sen. Daniel Akaka cast their pro-drilling votes in an effort to represent Alaskan constituents, not their own. “To me, the [refuge] is really about whether or not the indigenous people who are directly impacted have a voice in the use of their lands," Sen. Akake said on the Senate floor before the vote last week, explaining his allegiance to the Inupiat Eskimos living on the refuge’s coastal plain who stand to gain economically from the lease of their land. Sen. Inouye stayed loyal to Hawaii’s oil dependence and to Republican Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, whom he has often described as his “brother.” Akake and fellow pro-drilling voter Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana sit on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, a panel where Republicans already have a 12-10 majority. In order for the entire budget package to be voted upon by both houses of Congress, last week’s budget resolution will have to first be passed in this committee.
The ideological vacillation characterizing the issue of arctic drilling today is a microcosm of the shifts in the debate’s partisan history. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who created ANWR in 1960. The creation of the refuge was most certainly based on the conservationist legacy begun by President Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong naturalist who began sanctioning wildlife reserves to protect them from exploitation by the new industrial tycoons and barons.
President Nixon signed the Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts into law during his administration. The pronounced divergence from original GOP environmental policies existing in the party today has resulted in organizations such as Republicans for Environmental Protection. REP was formed in 1995 with the explicit mission of “ expect[ing] our elected leaders to look out for our interests and the interests of future generations, not just those of extractive industries and others with deep pockets who seek short-term profits by weakening the laws that give long-term protection to the American people and the land and creatures we all love…There is nothing more conservative than conservation.” REP boasts a sizable membership including members of the Roosevelt and Eisenhower families. “Father of Conservatism” Barry Goldwater was one of the group’s first members.
As effective as Governor Murkowski’s 2001 paper testimonial proved last week in Washington, the metaphor has not successfully muffled the political and ideological complexities the Senate vote represents. Just as in the childhood game, in thise case, paper loses to the scissors of political polemics.
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