[Mb-civic] Arctic Folly - Jimmy Carter - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Arctic Folly

By Jimmy Carter
Tuesday, September 13, 2005; Page A27

Congress is about to make one of those big decisions that marks an era. 
Unless wiser heads prevail, it may do it badly -- making the wrong 
decision in the wrong way and about the wrong place. At stake is 
America's greatest wildlife sanctuary, the Arctic National Wildlife 
Refuge. To dissuade Congress from this environmental tragedy, Americans 
must rally, and quickly.

Congress had its Pyrrhic energy victory this summer, with a new energy 
policy that ignores much-needed conservation measures and gives the oil 
industry large new tax breaks regardless of where it drills and pumps. 
Surely Congress has done more than enough to increase the profits of the 
oil industry.

Yet now, in a separate decision, the White House and Big Oil are 
pressuring Congress to allow drilling rigs to rip into the ecological 
heart of America's preeminent wildlife sanctuary. We must not confuse 
this with Prudhoe Bay, which lies west of the Arctic refuge and is 
already an industrial landscape resembling Houston more than Yellowstone.

With increasing gasoline prices bringing economic hardship and concern 
to many Americans, we must not be misled by oil lobbyists who are trying 
to convince us that our energy security is singularly dependent on 
sacrificing the Arctic refuge. They promote the false premise that 
development will touch just a few thousand acres when, in fact, it would 
introduce roads and pipelines spider-webbing across hundreds of 
thousands of acres on the fragile coastal plain.

We cannot drill our way to energy security or lower gasoline prices as 
long as our nation sits on just 3 percent of world oil reserves yet 
accounts for 25 percent of all oil consumption. An obvious answer is to 
increase the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles, at least to the level we 
set more than a quarter-century ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/12/AR2005091201347.html
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