Letter: Refuge facts are not ‘liberal spin’

Friday, Jan. 27, 2006 | 7:10 a.m.

In his Jan. 24 letter, Jim Corwin called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a "wasteland" and wrote the fact that Arctic Refuge oil would take a decade to reach the market was "the same old liberal spin we've been hearing from the Democrats for some time."

As it turns out, President Dwight Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; the Reagan administration later called the area where drilling would take place its "biological heart." In addition to musk oxen, thousands of migratory birds and polar bears, the refuge is home to the 129,000-strong Porcupine Caribou herd.

Any oil we manage to extract from this pristine wilderness would not hit the market for about 10 years. Far from "liberal spin," this fact has been noted by Terry Koonce, president of exploration and production at ExxonMobil, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Energy Department.

America needs real solutions to our energy crisis, not politics. Simply building our cars and trucks to go further on a gallon of gasoline would save far more oil than the refuge could ever produce, and would save us a few bucks as well.

Brad Johnson

Phoenix

The writer is the Nevada organizer for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.