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Shady Environmentalism
Reed Irvine Environmentalists come in many shades of green, but a lot of them are just plain shady, ignoring science and common sense and jumping on the green bandwagon for partisan political purposes. This is evident in the rush of a lot of normally sensible people to bash the Bush environmental initiatives. All of a sudden, thanks to a last minute move by Bill Clinton, countless Americans began quaking in their boots, having learned from the media that something very few of them had ever heard of before, arsenic in drinking water, might give them cancer. They were not told that this conclusion was based on studies in countries where the level of arsenic in drinking water is as much as ten times higher that the 50 parts per billion maximum level permitted in the U.S. We have yet to see a study showing that cancers caused by arsenic are more prevalent in communities in this country where arsenic in drinking water is above average than in those communities where it is below average. We have seen a story in the New York Times reporting that arsenic is used at the Sloan Kettering Institute to cure a particularly vicious type of leukemia. Even more than arsenic in drinking water, the proposed drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been used to bash Bush and Cheney. Back in the 1980s. two of our most influential newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, favored exploitation of the oil in this remote, inhospitable region of Alaska. In 1987, a Washington Post editorial describing this area as "one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent" said, "(T)here is hardly any other place where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life...Congress would be right to go ahead and, with all the conditions and environmental precautions that apply to Prudhoe Bay, see what’s under the refuge’s tundra." In 1988, a New York Times editorial said of this area, "(T)he potential is enormous and the environmental risks are modest...the likely value of the oil far exceeds plausible estimates of the environmental cost." It concluded "(I)t is hard to see why absolutely pristine preservation of this remote wilderness should take precedence over the nation’s energy needs." Since then our energy needs have become more pressing, but with new editorial-page editors, both of these papers are now singing a different tune about the ANWR. At the Times, editorial-page editor Howell Raines, has dumbed-down the paper’s editorial and Op-Ed pages. A good example is an editorial on drilling for oil in the ANWR published last March. It said, "This page has addressed the folly of trespassing on a wondrous wildlife preserve for what, by official estimates, is likely to be a modest amount of economically recoverable oil." What the Post had described as "one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent," had been transformed in 14 years to "a wondrous wildlife preserve." Having worked that miracle, Raines has been designated as the next executive editor of the New York Times. Fred Hiatt, who succeeded Meg Greenfield as editorial-page editor of the Washington Post, effected a similar transformation. Now a Post editorial describes that formerly remote, bleak wasteland as "a unique ecological resource" and says that exploiting it "for more oil to feed more of the same old profligate habits would be to take the wrong step first." The Post accused the Alaska senators who advocate drilling for oil in the ANWR of "demagoguery." Senator Frank Murkowski sent a letter to the Post in which he pointed out that Alaska has 125 million acres of national parks, preserves and wildlife refuges, of which 19 million acres are in the ANWR. Congress set aside 1.5 million ANWR acres for possible oil and gas exploration. The Bush proposal is to permit drilling on about 2,000 acres, about one-hundredth of one percent of the entire refuge. Sen. Murkowski concluded, "I suggest the demagoguery comes when you follow the extreme environmentalist line: 19 million acres for wildlife and pristine conditions and not even 2,000 acres for energy security." Energy security is not a minor consideration. The U.S. imported 37 percent of its oil in the 1970s and 57 percent today. It is said that ANWR could supply only enough oil to meet our needs for six months. That might be true if ANWR were our only source of oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there is enough oil there to replace our imports from Saudi Arabia for the next 20 to 30 years. Only a very shady environmentalist would shun that. Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org
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