Analysis
Some Facts Clear In the War of Spin Over Arctic Refuge
By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 6, 2002; Page A03
Last spring, the Interior Department tried to put together a slide show of facts about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was no easy task. Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton had made no secret of her desire to open up the refuge to high-tech oil drilling, but the department's biologists were not shy about emphasizing their environmental concerns. Ann Klee, Norton's top adviser, wrinkled her nose at one of their early presentations.
"Don't you guys have any ugly pictures of ANWR?" Klee asked.
She was kidding. But as the Senate began debating the future of that remote patch of tundra under a comprehensive energy bill it took up yesterday, there was a larger point to her joke. The raging debate over drilling in Alaska has been a triumph of spin over science, with ideologues on both sides taking a selective approach to the facts. A 1.5 million-acre swath of wilderness that few Americans have ever visited has been transformed into a political abstraction, a blank canvas for advocates to cover with portraits that suit their arguments.
In general, drilling proponents exaggerate how much oil the United States can expect to recover from the refuge and how much it would reduce the nation's dependence on foreign producers, while critics understate the potential benefits of oil production. Anti-drilling forces have warned of ecological catastrophe based on scant scientific evidence, while pro-drilling forces have twisted facts to suggest that oil exploration would have no environmental impact at all.
Similarly, some environmentalists describe the refuge as if it were Alaska's last pristine place, when in fact the state has enough protected public land to blanket all of Texas. And some proponents argue that opening the Arctic should be no big deal because drilling is allowed in some wildlife refuges, when in fact this would be the first refuge opened to drilling since the 1960s.
"People use the facts in pretty strange ways," said Kenneth Bird, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey who has studied the oil potential of the refuge. "It seems like there's always something missing in the analysis."
This debate over drilling has flared on and off for decades, but over the past year it has turned into a kind of economy-versus-environment proxy war, fought with almost religious fervor.
On one side are green groups that see the issue as a symbol of a heartless anti-environmental assault by the Bush administration and its supporters in the extraction industries. On the other side are conservative groups who see a mindless anti-capitalist campaign to defend caribou at the expense of people. Environmentalists have made "America's Serengeti" their top fundraising and lobbying issue; the petroleum industry, meanwhile, has given $40 million to Washington politicians since the 2000 campaign cycle. The two sides cannot even agree on the terms of the debate: drilling opponents refer to "the Arctic refuge" or "the coastal plain," while proponents tend to call it "ANWR" or "the 1002 area," a legal term.
But while both sides have played games with the facts, some of the basic questions about the issue have relatively clear answers.
How much oil is out there?
No one knows for sure. But the environmental movement's favorite statistic is a USGS estimate that the coastal plain contains 3.2 billion barrels of "economically recoverable" oil at the current price of $20 per barrel – about what the nation uses in six months. Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), drilling's top advocate in Congress, has shot back in speeches and a letter to The Post that the USGS actually estimates 10.3 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil. The truth, according to Bird, who conducted the study, is that Murkowski is wrong and the environmentalists are right.
But Bird makes another point: "That's a lot of oil!" More than $60 billion worth, just sitting underground. The six-month figure assumes the United States would stop accepting oil from all other sources, which, Bird says, is "totally ludicrous." The refuge probably won't produce as much oil as nearby Prudhoe Bay, America's largest field, but Bird does believe it could be the largest new field in decades. And as technology improves, it may become more economical to recover more oil there.
Would it reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil?
Yes, a little. According to the Energy Department, the United States now imports 57 percent of its oil, and without new domestic energy sources, it may import 67 percent by 2020. The refuge oil could cut those numbers by a few percentage points. The American Petroleum Institute's best-case scenario found that opening the refuge – which would presumably lead to exploration of nearby Native-owned land as well – could supply about 5 percent of the nation's oil consumption.
Environmentalists point out that many drilling advocates who rail about America's dependence on foreign oil are fighting efforts to reduce that dependence by increasing fuel-efficiency standards for American cars. The bottom line is that the United States and its SUVs account for one-fourth of the world's oil consumption, much more than it produces, so anything that increases domestic supply by adding production or decreases demand by improving energy efficiency will reduce – but not eliminate – U.S. reliance on others.
Will drilling destroy the refuge's wildlife?
There is no doubt that animals like to hang out on ANWR's coastal plain. A few polar bears have set up dens there. The 129,000-member Porcupine Caribou Herd often rambles through for insect relief and calving. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists call the coastal plain the refuge's "center for wildlife activity," citing musk oxen, wolves and 125 bird species. And studies have shown that much of that wildlife tends to avoid oil fields.
The bulk of the science, however, has not shown that North Slope oil fields have been deadly or even very harmful to wildlife. Polar bears are doing fine. The Central Arctic Caribou Herd has actually expanded from 5,000 to 27,000. Norton recently got caught giving Congress misleading and even inaccurate statements about caribou science, but she was right in saying that predictions of ecological disaster simply have not come true.
Will drilling sully the refuge's wilderness values?
The simple answer is yes. The coastal plain will have a massive industrial complex on it. The more complicated questions are: How massive? And to what effect?
Oil technology has progressed dramatically beyond the hulking, sprawling infrastructure of Prudhoe Bay; the newer Alpine field nearby sucks oil from an area as big as the District of Columbia on a pad the size of the Capitol grounds. The ANWR bill that passed the House would limit the "footprint" of oil infrastructure that touches the tundra to 2,000 acres. And while those acres could be spread throughout the coastal plain, Alaska would still retain more than half of the United States' designated wilderness – an area the size of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia and Maryland combined. Norton has also vowed to limit drilling to winter and to require ice roads and other methods to minimize the environmental impacts.
Still, there will be impacts. Oil infrastructure damages tundra and vegetation even when it doesn't spill; and at Prudhoe Bay, there has been an average of a spill a day, mostly small, but totaling 1.5 million gallons of toxic materials since 1995. In the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge near Anchorage, the Fish and Wildlife Service is studying whether 350 toxic spills from oil fields have contributed to an abnormal number of deformed frogs.
Ultimately, most Americans don't know the details of this intricate debate; they've just seen a few pretty pictures of the refuge. And even those pictures, as Klee suggested last spring, can be misleading. They often show ANWR's majestic Brooks Range, which will be preserved as wilderness regardless of the Senate's decision. They often show the refuge in springtime, when the landscape is lush but drilling would be forbidden.
So last Wednesday, Norton mailed the nation's network and cable news anchors a videotape – supplied by Arctic Power, a pro-drilling lobbying group in Alaska – showing the coastal plain in wintertime, with no polar bears or caribou running around.
It looks white. It looks blustery. It looks flat.
It looks kind of ugly.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
