| NEWS
The president's budget proposal calls for leasing the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain - the biological heart of the Refuge - for oil and gas drilling.
Using wildly speculative calculations, the President's proposal claims that lease sales in the Refuge will generate $2.4 billion. Generating this much money would only happen if oil companies paid more than 10 times per acre what they've been willing to pay for any lease on Alaska's North Slope in the last 15 years!
Moreover, the estimates of recoverable reserves represent just a drop in the bucket of our oil consumption - at most, a few months' supply of oil. Finally, the President's budget proposal uses an accounting gimmick to claim that the oil drilling development would be limited to a small area of the Refuge's coastal plain.
This accounting includes only the area where oil production facilities actually touch the ground - it does not include the gravel mines, roads, and pipelines that would be necessary to produce oil in this vast area. Neither does the President's calculation include destructive seismic or other exploration operations that would occur across the 1.5 million acre area. The fact is that the development footprint would be enormous, and would devastate wildlife populations.
Defenders of Wildlife urges Members of Congress to amend the President's proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic Refuge on the grounds that the revenue and oil supply projections are highly speculative and the damage to America's most pristine wilderness area would be devastating.
|
