http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050418ta_talk_kolbert
WASTED ENERGY
Issue of 2005-04-18
Posted 2005-04-11
The act that designated the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was signed
into law on December 2, 1980, by President Jimmy Carter, just a few
weeks before he left office. It already had a long and troubled
history. The act had taken nearly a decade to negotiate, and during
this period Carter had been vilified in Anchorage and burned in effigy
in Fairbanks. Meanwhile, even though the overarching purpose of the
act was supposed to be conservation—the Arctic Refuge is only a small
part of the more than a hundred million acres it set aside—by the time
it worked its way through Congress it was riddled with parochial and
environmentally dubious provisions such as subsidies for logging in
national forests. The act’s treatment of the refuge itself was
particularly equivocal. Some eighteen million acres of mountainous and
inaccessible terrain were declared off limits to development. But the
land that actually needed protection—one and a half million acres of
caribou calving grounds along the Beaufort Sea—was left in legislative
limbo. A future Congress could study that area’s oil and gas potential
and then, if it wished, authorize drilling.
The result of this arrangement has been a battle as long and, up until
now, at least, as ineffectual as any on Capitol Hill. The acres left
up for grabs in 1980 are often referred to as the “1002 area,” after
the section of the bill that dealt—or, rather, failed to deal—with
their fate. In 1987, President Reagan recommended drilling in the
1002, but Congress rejected the idea. In 1995, Congress authorized
opening the area, only to be thwarted by President Clinton. Picking up
where Reagan had left off, President George W. Bush, in 2001, included
a drilling provision in his ill-fated energy bill; after that bill
died, Senate Republicans tried, unsuccessfully, to insert a similar
provision into the 2004 budget resolution. Last month, this tactic
finally worked, and the Senate approved a budget that would open up
the 1002 area. The House of Representatives, however, has not passed
the same budget, so the fate of the refuge is now tangled up with a
great number of other issues, including Medicaid funding, which have
nothing to do with it but which will determine whether or not the two
houses can agree on a spending plan. Perversely, one of the key votes
in favor of drilling for oil in Alaska came from Senator Mel Martinez,
Republican of Florida, who backed it in return for a promise from the
Bush Administration to extend a moratorium on drilling for oil in the
eastern Gulf of Mexico. (“I would understand how some might view it as
a problem,” Martinez said of this deal.)
Over the past few weeks, Administration officials have been lobbying
hard in favor of opening the refuge. In a speech in Columbus, Ohio,
President Bush claimed that drilling operations would be limited to an
area the size of that city’s airport, and would eventually produce
enough crude to “reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to a
million barrels of oil a day.” In TV appearances and op-ed pieces,
Interior Secretary Gale Norton has sounded similar themes, arguing, on
the one hand, that drilling will have almost no impact on
wildlife—“The overall ‘footprint’ of the equipment and facilities
needed to develop the 1002 area would be restricted to two thousand
acres,” she wrote last month in the Times—and, on the other, that it
is an essential part of “a comprehensive energy strategy.” At this
point, it would be hard to say which part of the Administration’s
argument—attempting to minimize drilling’s environmental impact or to
maximize its strategic significance—is more misleading. (To get to the
two-thousand-acre figure, you have to be willing to consider the
“footprint” of, say, thirty miles’ worth of pipeline as just the area
where the pipeline’s supports touch the ground.)
No one really knows how much oil lies under the 1002 area; a standard
estimate is that seven and a half billion barrels are “technically
recoverable.” (Some of the oil may be so expensive to extract that
recovery isn’t economically feasible.) For most countries, a reserve
of this size would represent a significant supply. Such is the United
States’ thirst for petroleum, however, that seven and a half billion
barrels is but a tastevin to a wino. The federal Energy Information
Administration recently predicted that, if drilling is approved this
year, crude could begin to flow from the Arctic Refuge in a decade,
and production would peak, at around eight hundred and seventy-five
thousand barrels a day, a dozen years later. The E.I.A. also
anticipates that by then demand in the United States will be so high
that the country will still have to import sixty-six per cent of its
oil, only four per cent less than if the refuge were left untouched.
With or without drilling in the Arctic Refuge, global oil production
is expected to start dropping sometime in the next several years,
owing to dwindling reserves. A forward-looking energy plan would
address this eventuality. Oil consumption in the United States has
been steadily rising since Jimmy Carter left office, in 1981. If
during that time fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks
had been raised by just five miles per gallon, we would now be using
one and a half million barrels of oil less each day, and if they had
been raised by ten miles per gallon we would be using two and a half
million barrels of oil less each day. If fuel-efficiency standards
were raised to forty miles per gallon—a level that is eminently
achievable with current technology—the United States would save sixty
billion barrels of oil over the next fifty years. Simply upgrading the
standards for replacement tires so that they match those for tires on
new cars would avert the need for seven billion barrels, which is
roughly the same amount we could hope to get out of the Arctic Refuge.
So clear are the numbers that just about everyone—outside the White
House and Capitol Hill—recognizes what’s needed. Recently, a group of
military experts sent the President a letter urging him, as a matter
of national security, to launch “a major new initiative to curtail
U.S. consumption.” One signatory, Frank Gaffney, the head of the
Center for Security Policy, told the Wall Street Journal that reducing
oil demand is “no longer a nice thing to do—it’s imperative.”
Preserving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge won’t, of course, do
anything to change energy use. But energy policy is no excuse for
destroying it.
— Elizabeth Kolbert
--
rot13
apatriot #1, atheist #1417,
Chief EAC prophet
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were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in
Hell.
-Mencken
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