Word: anwr
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...meager amount of petroleum purported to be buried in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Senate Republicans have not only mortgaged the future of a swath of unspoiled wilderness, they have cast their respect for America’s political process in doubt...
...briefly recap the facts: ANWR is an immense tract of untamed land in northern Alaska originally created in 1960 by noted caribou-hugger President Dwight D. Eisenhower. For almost 20 years, oil companies have had their eyes set on the coastal regions of that sanctuary, where there may be oil. May be, of course, because no one really knows; current estimates are that ten billion barrels of oil may be extractable. Thus, in a decade or two, drilling thirty coastal locations in ANWR could theoretically provide the U.S. with four percent of its current oil needs, at its peak capacity...
Proponents of ANWR drilling have been improperly minimizing the effects of oil development for years. They like to cite the growth of the caribou herd at Prudhoe Bay—a Northern Alaska drilling site that has been open for business since 1977—where caribou wander daily through industrial sites. But they ignore evidence that total herd growth is sustained by the females whose fecundity is least affected by industrialization. For the shrinking ANWR caribou herds, the impact of drilling on fertility could sound a death knell. Drilling proponents like to point to the small physical footprint...
...development. At the start, I could not see how the government could justify developing one of the few unspoiled ecosystems left on the planet. I thought at the time that the Western Arctic Reserve (not the same as the better known Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—ANWR) would be worth more as an ecological entity than for the oil beneath its soil...
...reduction would be modest. Even if the ANWR would yield 1 million bbl. daily of crude oil, as suggested by the President, by the time pipelines are built and production gets under way, the oil would displace less than 10% of U.S. imports. And there are no guarantees for the 1 million bbl. In the early days of the North Slope project, politicians predicted that consumers would get 3.8 million bbl. of crude oil daily out of Alaska "by the end of the century." Instead production hit a high of 2 million bbl. in 1988--the only year at that...