Word: crude
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Once upon a time, the nation's leaders tried to exorcise the deficit devil with a frightful fairy tale: if they couldn't find the wisdom and courage to reduce spending and raise revenue themselves, a crude wrecking ball would knock many billions from government programs. The threat of an indiscriminate "sequester" of funds, the story went, would be so politically devastating as to scare the government into facing its fiscal responsibilities. That fantasy, in the form of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act five years ago, projected a balanced budget by fiscal 1991, which begins Oct. 1. But the brutal...
...months since the Exxon Valdez spewed 11 million gal. of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound, controversy has dogged the cleanup efforts. The debate continued last week, as Exxon ended a second summer of mopping up and declared the cleanup over unless its survey next spring proves a need for more. The tab so far: $2 billion plus. Alaskan officials were not quite so upbeat. Insisting that "substantial oil remains," outgoing Governor Steve Cowper said, "We can't take a walk and let Mother Nature finish...
...aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War and to strengthen his position as the new superpower of the Arab world. The current price inflation at the gas pump, after all, owes more to the U.N. sanctions and blockade--and to oil company profiteering--than to Iraqi manipulation of the crude oil market...
...size of the oil deposit, however, is a mystery. The Interior Department's estimate ranges from 600 million bbl. of crude to as much as 9.2 billion bbl. At the high end, the oil reservoir would be roughly equal to Alaska's enormous Prudhoe Bay field, or more than the U.S. uses in a year. The Interior Department puts the odds of finding a commercially exploitable oil field in the refuge at 1 in 5, vs. the industry's typical success rate...
Advocates of drilling on the refuge emphasize that the pumping operations would involve an area only the size of Delaware, while the entire preserve is nearly as large as Maine. And the crude could be carried cheaply in the 800- mile trans-Alaska pipeline, which has a good safety record. Environmentalists, however, see the drilling as a gross intrusion on one of the last untouched wilderness areas. Many Eskimos favor development because they would legally share in the income. But the Gwich'in Indians in Arctic Village (pop. 100) near the refuge bitterly oppose it. "This is a simple issue...