ANWR

[Guest guest]

Two Thousand Acres

By Paul Krugman | New York Times

March 1, 2002

 

According to my calculations, my work space occupies only a few square inches

of office floor. You may find this implausible, but I'm using a well-accepted

methodology. Well accepted, that is, among supporters of oil drilling in the

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

 

Last week Interior Secretary Gale Norton repeated the standard response to

concerns about extensive oil development in one of America's last wild

places: " The impact will be limited to just 2,000 out of 1.9 million acres of

the refuge. " That number comes from the House version of the Bush-Cheney

energy plan, which promises that " surface acreage covered by production and

support facilities " will not exceed 2,000 acres. It's a reassuring picture: a

tiny enclave of development, practically lost in the Arctic vastness.

 

But that picture is a fraud. Development won't be limited to a small enclave:

according to the U.S. Geological Survey, oil in ANWR is scattered in many

separate pools, so drilling rigs would be spread all across the coastal

plain. The roads linking those rigs aren't part of the 2,000 acres: they're

not " production and support facilities. " And " surface acreage covered " is

very narrowly defined: if a pipeline snakes across the terrain on a series of

posts, only the ground on which those posts rest counts; bare ground under

the pipeline isn't considered " covered. "

 

Now you see how I work in such a small space. By those definitions, my

" impact " is limited to floor areas that literally have stuff resting on them:

the bottoms of the legs on my desk and chair, and the soles of my shoes. The

rest of my office floor is pristine wilderness.

 

There's a lesson here that goes well beyond the impact of oil drilling on

caribou. Deceptive advertising pervades the administration's effort to sell

the nation on its drill-and-burn energy strategy. In fact, those of us

following this issue can't see why people made such a fuss about the

Pentagon's plan to disseminate false information. How would that differ from

current policy?

 

Remember that this latest push to open up ANWR for drilling follows on the

heels of an attempt to portray a plan to do nothing much about global warming

as a major policy initiative. What else has the administration said about its

energy plans that isn't true?

 

Top of the list, surely, is the claim that drilling in ANWR is a national

security issue, the key to ending our dependence on imported oil. In fact,

the Energy Information Administration's preferred scenario says that even a

decade after development begins, ANWR will produce only between 600,000 and

900,000 barrels of oil a day -- a small fraction of the 11 million barrels we

currently import.

 

Then there's the absurd claim that ANWR drilling will create hundreds of

thousands of jobs -- a claim based on a decade-old study by, you guessed it,

the oil industry's trade association.

 

But the most nefarious aspect of the administration's energy propaganda is

its persistent effort to link energy shortages to environmentalism -- an

effort that, it's now clear, has often been consciously dishonest.

 

For example, last spring Dick Cheney lamented the fact that the U.S. hadn't

built any new oil refineries since the 1970's, linking that lack of

construction to environmental restrictions. I wrote a column last May

pointing out that environmentalism had nothing to do with it, that refineries

hadn't been built because the industry had excess capacity. What I didn't

know was that several weeks earlier staffers at the Environmental Protection

Agency had written a scathing critique of Mr. Cheney's draft energy report,

making exactly the same point. The final version of the report, by the way,

doesn't say in so many words that clean-air rules cause gasoline shortages --

but it conveys that impression by innuendo.

 

For now, it's possible for diligent citizens to cut through these deceptions

-- for example, you can read on the Web what the U.S. Geological Survey

actually has to say about oil reserves in the Arctic. But I keep wondering

when the administration will shut down those Web sites. After all, under John

Ashcroft's new rules, agencies are no longer instructed to release

information whenever possible; they're supposed to refuse requests to release

information whenever there's a legal basis for doing so. And honest

assessments of oil reserves in environmentally sensitive locations might be

useful to terrorists -- you never know.