Deception begins with a 58-sec video on the White House web site in which President Barack Obama says he'll ask Congress to make the whole Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska a federal wilderness. As the president speaks, the video scans gorgeous mountains, snowy ridges, and other elements of what he rightly describes as "this amazing wonder." Much of the 19.8-million-acre refuge is like that. The 1.5-million-acre parcel that Congress can open to federal oil and gas leasing, the coastal plain, is not. This visual duplicity is an old trick of leasing opponents.
Nearly half of ANWR already is wilderness, a designation that precludes commercial activity, road-building, and other activities that might leave human imprint, including transit by "mechanical transport." The rest is protected almost as strictly against development by the "wildlife refuge" designation. The coastal plain holds special status, identified by law for study of oil and gas potential. By heralding in the video an Interior Department plan for "designating new areas, including coastal plains, for preservation" and asserting his quest for blanket wilderness designation, Obama makes clear he doesn't care what the law says.
Bleak and frigid
ANWR gets its name and modern configuration from the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980. Sect. 1002 of the law directed Interior to conduct geological and biological studies of the coastal plain and to make recommendations to Congress about management. The next section required congressional approval of oil and gas leasing on what became known as the 1002 area. The House or Senate has approved coastal-plain leasing a total of 15 times-only once in the same session. That vote came in a budget bill in 1995, which President Bill Clinton vetoed.
Unlike most of ANWR, the coastal plain is not lovely. It's flat, bleak, and frigid, dark 56 days each winter. The ecosystem, far from being unique, resembles those of other Arctic coasts.
And the ANWR coastal plain is not, as Obama claimed in his video, "pristine, undisturbed." It has villages, roads, and old military installations. It also has oil seeps. Proposing it for wilderness designation is as misleading as attributing to its barren landscape the profoundly different qualities of inland foothills and mountains.
The gambit should add an edge to legal questions about the president's move. The state government says Interior's wilderness review of ANWR violates a clause in the 1980 act requiring congressional approval for additions to Alaskan wilderness exceeding 5,000 acres. Interior insists the requirement doesn't apply because ANWR already encompasses the 1002 area. The state argues further that the review, which excludes oil and gas exploration, violates a National Environmental Protection Act requirement for consideration of alternative land uses.
The Wilderness Act of 1964, moreover, defines a "wilderness" is "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain…without permanent improvements or human habitation." The coastal plain has been trammeled about as much as can be expected for a place so inhospitable. Native Alaskans live there. Seismic surveys have been shot over it. In 1985, Chevron and partners drilled the famously tight KIC-1 well outside the Inupiat village of Kaktovik. Congress obviously didn't consider the ANWR coastal plain promising as wilderness when it called for studies about possible oil and gas development.
Pandering to base
None of this will matter to an administration famous for its expansive view of legality. Obama is pandering to the antioil faction of his political base, which hopes to keep new supply out of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline as throughput approaches minimum operating rates. He'll say whatever he must to argue for permanently foreclosing exploration of geological features with potential to hold an estimated 10 billion bbl of oil. And when Congress balks, he'll disparage Republicans for not caring about caribou and polar bears.
Although the ANWR blitz came as a surprise, it's really nothing new.
