November 10, 2005

To Drill or not to Drill? That is the Question

There are quite a few interesting developments from Capitol Hill. One of the big ones has to do with drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. House moderates have basically forced GOP leadership to strip that part out of the entire budget bill so it won’t be in the House version. But it is in the Senate version. Eventually, conferees on both sides will huddle in a room and decide if it stays or goes. House moderates say if it comes back into the final Senate-House version, then they’ll vote against the budget bill and that means the GOP leadership won’t have the votes to pass it. But the bet here is that it stays in the final version and somehow someway, Roy Blunt, Dennis Hastert, and yes, even Tom Delay find a way to twist enough arms ( maybe even make some future promises) to get those moderates to vote for the final bill. I mean, let’s think about this for a moment. Is ANWR really worth fighting for if you’re a house moderate considering that Hastert and Blunt may promise you something much more enticing to your home district in the future? I think we know the answer to that.

In May of this year, I went up to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I visited the small Eskimo village of Kaktovik which is the only place inside the area where the government wants to drill. The people there mostly favor the drilling (75 percentor so). They know that drilling there means they’ll get a nice cut of the profits and for a community that is pretty poor, that means a lot to them. Having said that, they are totally against offshore drilling, and they admit that they are concerned that onshore drilling will turn into offshore drilling. You see, they hunt whales up there and use the blubber for food and supplies. If the whales stop migrating there because of the offshore drilling, that will be a major hit to their community.

Check out the following links to learn more about ANWR:

www.anwr.org
http://www.anwr.org/features/kaktovik.htm

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