YES, 'FRAID SO. MORE ON ANWR

The vote will probably be today, so I add a little more info to the fire.  A couple of people noted in their comments to the previous ANWR post that their senators (from places like PA and TN) are not likely to be on the side of the angels, or, rather, the caribou and muskoxen.  These are exactly the senators who need to hear our voices.  They are supposed to represent their constituents' interests, the theory goes. They certainly need to hear, loudly and clearly, what those interests are.

From salon.com's "War Room," a daily compendium of current political news, as important to me as a multivitamin, the news that Kerry has entered the ANWR fray:

The Bush-Kerry tundra turf war

There's a Bush vs. Kerry rematch this week over the tundra turf of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

At the request of the Bush administration, Republicans in the Senate have tacked a provision onto a budget resolution which would open the refuge to drilling. Since budget resolutions can't be filibustered, now the advocates of opening the refuge only need 51 votes to let oil companies into the still-pristine land of muskoxen and caribou.

Sen. John Kerry has joined Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., in a campaign to try to strip the Arctic drilling provision out of the budget resolution. The senators believe they have the votes to succeed in doing so, but the forces working to pry open the Arctic for drilling are just as confident that they have the votes to pull it off.

Meanwhile, the Bush adminstration's new line on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge isn't just that the country needs the relatively small amount of oil under it, but that the sprawling machinery for extracting it won't really trouble the wildlife living there. (Really.) Bush's interior secretary, Gale Norton, in an Op-Ed piece in Monday's New York Times argued that drilling technology has improved so much, that the caribou and muskox will barely notice it at all.

A scolding from the Times editorial board casts a shadow on Norton's sunny notion: "Where Ms. Norton sees undisturbed tundra, [environmentalists] see hundreds of miles of pipelines, roads and drilling platforms, which would fragment wildlife habitats and corrupt a wilderness that, according to recent polls, a majority of Americans wish to leave undisturbed. We have expressed such reservations ourselves. But what troubles us most about President Bush's fixation on drilling is what it says about the shallowness of his energy policy."

Whatever the cost to wildlife, the Times says, the limited amount of oil there wouldn't do much to fix our energy problems, adding: "Any number of modest efficiencies could achieve the same result without threatening the refuge. Simply closing the so-called S.U.V. loophole -- making light trucks as efficient overall as ordinary cars -- would save a million barrels a day. Increasing fuel-economy standards for cars by about 50 percent, to 40 miles per gallon, a perfectly reasonable expectation, would save 2.5 million barrels a day."

But if you think that Bush administration and the Republican controlled Congress is likely to go for either of those ideas, we've got a caribou-friendly drilling platform to sell you.

-- Katharine Mieszkowski

And, this piece from Truthout's Environmental Page is worth reading:

ANWR on the Brink - Again
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 14 March 2005

It's just one wildlife refuge in Alaska, but it seems to have Washington, D.C. tied in knots. A million and a half acres of wilderness in the far north, with a small puddle of oil beneath its surface - who would think that a place like that could be responsible for the turmoil in Washington that it is causing?

President Bush went on the stump last week in Ohio, calling for the opening of the refuge to oil development, stating it would "create thousands of jobs" and reduce oil imports. He said we need to drill there "for the sake of national security," to end our dependence on foreign oil. He called on Congress to pass an energy bill that includes the opening of ANWR.

But the U.S. Geological Survey has concluded that there are probably only 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil in ANWR. That amounts to just a six-month supply for the U.S. The price for that oil is the spoiling of a pristine wilderness that is a vital nursery for one of the largest remaining caribou herds and a home to polar bears, arctic foxes, white wolves and migratory birds.

Since coming to office, Bush has tried hard to get Congress to open the refuge and has been rebuffed more than once by the Senate. Yet with Republican victories last fall, he may now have the votes he needs - if he can avoid a filibuster.

The filibuster is the Republican bete noir, the only thing that stands between them and total domination of all three branches of government. Senate Majority leader Bill Frist has threatened to remove the 200-year-old senate rule that allows a minority to use endless debate to block voting. Doing away with the filibuster would mark a radical change in the Senate and is being dubbed "the nuclear option."  Read the rest of the article here. 
(It's a link, really, even though it's not blue.)