By Elizabeth Kolbert
    The New Yorker

    18 April 2005 Issue

    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.