Editorial: Symbolism in ANWR debate

April 16, 2001
As the US economy falters, symbolism gains importance in the controversy over leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain.

As the US economy falters, symbolism gains importance in the controversy over leasing of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain. That should help the leasing cause.

For leasing opponents, the issue has always been symbolic. And the lofty perspective works. Congress has not approved leasing of the coastal plain and remains disinclined to do so.

Environmental groups consider ANWR a benchmark political issue. To them, it's a token of success for a broader agenda oriented to forestalling economic activity in the name of environmental protection. And it's great for their fund-raising.

So they portray ANWR as "pristine," a "wilderness," a "unique" national "treasure," the last of its kind, the calving ground of the Porcupine caribou herd. In their view, leasing means drilling, and drilling means ruin. ANWR thus becomes holy ground that environmentalist piety must defend against commercial greed.

If environmentalists hadn't long ago made that leap, oil might now be flowing from the coastal plain. Stripped of the symbolism, their antileasing arguments are unpersuasive.

Tiny area

Yes, much of ANWR is pristine, mountainous, ecologically unique. Most of it, in fact, is already designated wilderness or refuge and will never be leased. The striking scenery from these parts of ANWR graces environmentalist literature but bears little resemblance to the comparatively tiny area that Congress in 1980 left open for geologic study.

That part of ANWR, the coastal plain, looks much different from the rest. It's flat tundra, frozen most of the year, with 56 sunless days each winter. And it's not pristine. It has a town, roads, and old radar stations. In the early 1970s, in fact, during disputes over construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, environmental groups dismissed the coastal plain and ANWR's northern foothills as being devoid of unique natural value.

The Porcupine caribou do meander onto various parts of the coastal plain most springs to deliver their offspring. But there's no reason to think oil and gas activity would discourage them. A herd that favors the Prudhoe Bay area thrives amid operations there.

Contrary to environmental assertion, drilling and production would not destroy the coastal plain's natural values. The Prudhoe Bay area has nicely endured more than 30 years of oil and gas work. And the industry has learned much about working safely in arctic conditions in the meantime.

With their arguments so easily countered, how do environmentalists so easily succeed with opposition to ANWR leasing? It must be the symbolism, the moral struggle between environmentalist good and commercial evil. So it is in similarly lofty realms that leasing supporters should press their own case.

Here, the weary US economy holds special relevance in the ANWR debate. The dot-com money machine is broken. Energy prices are rising. The country needs something more substantial than computer games to stimulate growth-something like development of natural resources, however quaint that might seem. With all due respect to new-economy innovation, wealth still comes from creative combinations of land, labor, and capital.

The land at issue here, ANWR's coastal plain, might contain 10.3 billion bbl of technically recoverable oil. That's the mean estimate of a 1998 study by the US Geological Survey. At peak, the area might produce 1.5 million b/d. If the price of crude oil averaged $22/bbl, revenue at the wellhead before transportation netbacks would come to $12 billion/year. The money would benefit US companies, workers, and governments rather than countries from which the oil would otherwise be imported.

Before production started, there would be investments of several tens of billions of dollars. Governments would begin collecting money immediately from lease bonuses. And the work would boost employment. In the 1980s, Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates (now WEFA), estimated that ANWR development would create 736,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, throughout the US over 10 years.

Inexplicable bias

When the economy so obviously needs a lift and the country so obviously needs energy, withholding land from the process-at ANWR, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, in the US West, or anywhere else-makes no sense.

ANWR leasing doesn't deserve the villainous tag environmentalism has assigned it. It is in fact more symbolic of economic potential restrained by an inexplicable bias against productive work-a bias that a weakening economy can't afford to indulge.