American oil junkies

Photographer Ansel Adams once said "it is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment." At the time, Adams was probably referencing Yellowstone National Park, a sanctuary for some of his most picturesque landscape still-frames.\nBut today, the environmental battle on Capitol Hill involves a land far removed from the mass transit hustle and concrete shuffle of Washington, D.C. The rope around the neck of the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge tightened during the holiday season as Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, upped the ante between the partisan aisles. \nThe controversy to drill oil and natural gas from the 1.5 million-acre sliver has brewed on Capitol Hill since 1987, when the Department of the Interior recommended Congress open the land for oil and gas exploration and development, according to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That group is a grassroots organization of miners, fishermen and loggers, among others from Anchorage, Alaska, dedicated to the issue of drilling oil in the wildlife refuge. \nThe ANWR kettle of controversy boiled over in 1995 when then-President Clinton vetoed a U.S. House and Senate approval to suck the land dry of oil.\nI watched C-SPAN in utter horror Dec. 21 as each U.S. senator muttered "yea" or "nay" to pass a defense appropriation bill that included slicing off 1.5 million acres of ANWR's legislatively-protected 19 million acres. Stevens had tacked a clause onto the bill that would have authorized the drilling of about 10 billion barrels of oil from one of America's most precious wildlife refuges.\n"Our military is being held hostage by ... Arctic drilling," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., told the Senate. The Senate later rejected the bill.\nCommentary from economic analyst Ben Lieberman in the Dec. 20 issue of The Washington Times praised the House of Representatives for voting in favor of a bill Dec. 19 that authorized aforementioned drilling in ANWR. He proclaimed several ANWR "tall tales" from "environmental activists and like-minded journalists" are creating a stink about "environmentally responsible \ndrilling." \nLieberman further stated that "high oil prices and political turmoil in many oil-producing nations" are due cause for his exposure of several ANWR "myths."\nAmong his most notable claims: "The current version of the bill limits the surface disturbance to 2,000 acres, a small piece of a big coastal plain in a very big wildlife refuge in the biggest state in the Union," and "there are plenty of truly pristine places in Alaska worth preserving, but ANWR's coastal plain isn't one of them."\nThe United States imported about 59 percent of the more than 20 million barrels of oil a day it consumed, according to government data interpreted by The Washington Post. We are talking about America's need to bucket about 12 million barrels of oil a day from foreign wells.\nIn that sense, ANWR is a quick fix for the black gold habit that is America's gluttonous thirst for oil. When is our government going to insist on national research and development of improved solar and wind technologies instead of gorging on a limited supply of fossil fuels?