GOP senator drilling for support: Sen. Lisa Murkowski hopes to use a budget resolution to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration and thus increase domestic production

Insight on the News, April 1, 2003 by Sheila R. Cherry

Even as the United States teetered on the edge of war with Iraq, the nation remained one of Saddam Hussein's best customers. U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) recently told members of the Energy Stewardship Alliance that when Venezuela's oil exports dried up in early December, U.S. imports from Iraq nearly tripled to 1.1 million barrels a day. This meant that the United States was buying 62 percent of Hussein's oil exports and sending him nearly $1 billion a month.

By increasing domestic production to prevent future dependency, Murkowski is proposing a bold advance against some holy ground of congressional politics, pushing to add authorization for oil exploration in 2,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. By authorizing the project through the budget resolution, as she proposes, the measure cannot be filibustered and requires only 51 votes to pass, rather than the 60 that would be needed to break a filibuster on a cloture vote.

Murkowski says she already has 49 solid votes. "Two Democrats who voted against ANWR last year--Sens. Max Cleland [of Georgia] and Jean Carnahan [of Missouri]--were defeated in November and replaced by Republican supporters of ANWR--Sens. Saxby Chambliss [of Georgia] and James Talent [of Missouri]," she says. "One Republican who voted against ANWR, Sen. Robert Smith of New Hampshire, was defeated in his primary and replaced by ANWR supporter John Sununu."

An Alaska fact sheet puts the 89,000-square-mile reserve, which sits above the Arctic Circle, into perspective. "ANWR is approximately the size of South Carolina," it notes. "The area directly affected by oil and gas development in ANWR would be equivalent in size to Washington, D.C's Dulles International Airport."

Murkowski was appointed to office by her father, former U.S. senator Frank Murkowski, after he won the Alaska governorship and resigned from the Senate. She expresses no illusions about the resistance the proposal will attract. State proponents of drilling in the small reserve area of ANWR are launching a $1.1 million education campaign, but Murkowski predicts they will be outspent 3-to-1 by environmentalist groups. "That's because ANWR is the best fund-raising tool [the environmentalists] have," she says. "Their financial officers cannot afford to lose it as an issue."

It did not take long for Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and 94 other House Democrats to notice that once again the Bush administration had included in the assumptions of the fiscal 2004 budget $1.2 billion in revenues from the proposed auction of oil leases in the coastal plain of ANWR. On Feb. 28, these Democratic congressmen sent a letter to House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member John Spratt (D-S.C.), urging them to continue their three-year practice of not listing the proposal as a budget item.

"The budget resolution was designed to ensure that important fiscal matters be debated and decided swiftly," the anti-ANWR Democrats argued in the letter. "It is simply not appropriate to attach such a major policy decision to the budget debate." In a separate statement, Markey said using the budget resolution to open ANWR to drilling would be an abuse of the budget process.

But, according to Murkowski, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles (R-Okla.) is committed to passing the proposal. "The Budget Committee chairman is the one committee chairman from whom we need support right now, and we have that support," she tells INSIGHT.

Al Adams, cochairman of the energy group Arctic Power and an Inupiat Eskimo, describes anti-ANWR environmentalists as well-meaning opponents with very little practical understanding of the area about which they are protesting. He says the Inupiat people, who actually reside within the North Slope, overwhelmingly favor developing ANWR, which he describes as a barren tundra for nine months of the year.

A key component of the arguments against oil drilling in ANWR is that part of the land parcel is a sensitive calving area for porcupine caribou. The concern is that the migration patterns of the porcupine caribou through Gwich'in Indian hunting lands near Arctic Village, southwest of ANWR, will shift as the animals attempt to avoid the production sites. But former Alaska governor Tony Knowles, a Democrat, noted in a March 2001 information brochure that similar development in Prudhoe Bay did not negatively impact the Central Arctic caribou indigenous to that area.

Robin Read, president and chief executive officer of the nonpartisan National Foundation for Women Legislators, recently visited oil-refinery sites at Prudhoe Bay at the invitation of Alaska state Sen. Bettye Davis, a Democrat. Within 48 hours of returning to Washington from her trip, Read gave INSIGHT her eyewitness account of the North Slope environment. "It is massive and beautiful" she said--and desolate. "I don't believe the arguments [against ANWR development] can stand once you've been there."

Read does not share Sen. Murkowski's enthusiasm about the prospect for authorization of ANWR drilling as part of a budget resolution. "We've got a lot going on with the war, and I just don't know that energy policy will be that important by comparison," Read predicts. Even if the proposal were to pass in the Senate this year, she continues, "It has to go back to the House again. It has to go into conference."