Editorial: Drilling specter rears again

Sunday, March 26, 2006 | 7:02 a.m.

For 25 years Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been trying to persuade Congress to open a coastal area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration and drilling. His failures during all of that time have not diminished his zeal for pursuing the venture, which he believes would bring tens of thousands of jobs and many other economic benefits to his state.

He is trying again this year and achieved a measure of success on March 16 when the Senate passed a budget bill containing language that would send the drilling crews and their whole supporting cast into the 1.5-million-acre portion of the refuge set aside by Congress in 1980 as possibly appropriate for oil exploration.

We have long opposed Stevens' needless vision of creating revenue for his state at the expense of one of the most pristine areas on Earth.

Across America industries are making rapid progress on developing new sources of energy, such as solar, biomass, geothermal, wind, biodiesel, ethanol and hydrogen. If drilling were to begin today in the ANWR, the first drops would not reach refineries for at least another 10 years - a time when these renewable industries will likely have made a large dent in the demand for oil.

We also point to Prudhoe Bay, the vast oil-producing region less than 100 miles west of the ANWR exploration site. Early estimates of the region's environmental "footprint" were 12,000 acres. Today the leaky operation spreads over nearly 650,000 acres. Supporters of ANWR drilling say it will disturb only 2,000 acres, as per a congressional mandate. But the fine print shows that those acres do not have to border each other.

Realistically, the ANWR operation could someday exceed that of Prudhoe, ruining much of the coastal area that is now unique in its beauty and critical for its wildlife habitat. At the same time the oil from the operation would compete with the emerging renewables industry, slowing for decades this most promising hope for a cleaner world.

We believe the House should do what it did last year - kill the ANWR measure.