Gasoline Prices, Politicians and ANWR

Lee Ellis

Are high gasoline prices taking too much of your money due to a shortage of oil? The Democrats complain that we Americans use too much gasoline and if we were to cut back on our driving, or drove only mini-cars, we would have much more oil. This would be fine if the following were not true:

1. China and other emerging nations are now adopting important elements of the capitalistic system by combining production cost efficiency with the latest manufacturing technology, often bought from America. China is rapidly absorbing much of America's industrial base. With China's accelerated development of a consumer sector, that nation's need for oil has surged dramatically, leading to new oil contracts with major oil producing nations. According to noted economic analyst Morris Beschloss, "This further limits America's oil procurement, as the global energy market could be facing critical shortages."

2. Almost everything we use daily, from plastics to pharmaceuticals, requires some form of oil to create it. Sometimes we forget that oil is not just used to manufacture gasoline.

So why are the Democrats fighting President Bush in drilling in an area of ANWR for oil. Ken Boyd, former Director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, writes, “… The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), as it exists today, was created through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) in 1980.” (Jimmy Carter was President.) “Section 1002 of ANILCA specifically set aside 1.5 million acres on the northern tier of ANWR for investigation of its oil and gas potential. This 1.5 million acres, known as the “1002 area” or the “Coastal Plain” represents about 8% of the land area of the ANWR and about 0.4% of the land in Alaska. The remaining 92% of the land in ANWR is in either wilderness or refuge status.”

Fenton Rexford, a native of the Inupiat tribe in Kaktovic, Alaska, tells us in a FLASH film (http://www.anwr.org/flash.htm) that we will create between a quarter and three-quarters of a million jobs for his people if we can drill for oil there. He states, further, that he has seen proof that animals thrive near the oil sites as shown in pictures of both bear and caribou enjoying the Prudhoe Bay area.

With new drilling technology, a drilling pad today near Kaktovic will take only a small footprint compared to the 1980 technology used in the Prudhoe Bay drilling. Brit Hume told us via Fox News that a good graphic comparison would be to lay a newspaper on a tennis court. This is how much of the ice-covered ANWR land set aside for oil-drilling that we would have to use.

Brit went on to demonstrate (using graphs from the USGS), that there is more oil under this ANWR land than all the oil under Texas and that if only half of what is expected to be discovered there is found, it would be more oil than we now get from Saudi Arabia AND Venezuela combined!

The environmentalists are always spreading their propaganda that all the animals, especially the caribou, will suffer and die if we drill in ANWR. I suspect that they chose these animals over the bears and other denizens of Alaska because of our emotions about Santa’s reindeer. Perhaps these political activists hope that we will never discover that the caribou herd at Prudhoe Bay was only 3,000 before we drilled there. Now this herd has grown to 36,000! And the Democrats are not letting us drill in ANWR?

Remember when the Democrat party was accusing President Bush of waging the war in Iraq only to obtain oil? Well, the Iraq elections have proved that premise to be wrong. Yet, now that we really need more oil, they deny us the right to get our oil here in the United States. This absurdity also keeps the USA from creating more jobs. One can certainly infer from this that they prefer keeping these jobs overseas in the Middle East. So much for Kerry’s cries against outsourcing.

I don’t blame you who are reading this if you stop and utter a primal scream right now. I know I am. After the shouting is over, let's write or phone our Senators and Representatives to ask them to lower gas prices and create new jobs by using more of our oil in Alaska, rather than to continue being held captive by large amounts of foreign oil.

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Lee Ellis is a retired journalist and narrator, formerly with both CBS and Gannett (USA Weekend). He was also a combat veteran of WWII, having fought in the South Pacific invasions. He had the pleasure of interviewing Ronald Reagan as an actor and then later working to help him become Governor of California. At the age of 80, he is keeping busy writing and doing free lance narrations for radio and television. He is an active member of Rotary and the VFW.

indiolee@dc.rr.com