Word: tundras
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White. No horizon. In the distance, sky and tundra fade together into a blue-white wash. The Arctic landscape has a great many shades of white: the crystalline white of blown snow. The gray-green white of ice on the sea. The silver white of a fox's fur. The turquoise white in the northern sky an hour before the sun comes up in the south to illuminate another short winter...
...idea of what drilling for that oil would do to ANWR, it helps to visit Prudhoe Bay, America's largest oil field. Just beyond the western edge of the refuge, Prudhoe lights up the tundra for miles with megawatts of yellow industrial light. Steam belches from plants eight stories high; flames shoot from natural-gas flares; and bulldozers the size of houses grind back and forth along 500 miles of roads that link the 170 drilling sites along the coast. Five thousand men--and a few women--work here, pumping 1.3 million bbl. a day down the trans-Alaska pipeline...
...industry has worked hard to clean up its act. New technologies allow wells to be clustered more closely together, with drilling done laterally below the surface--reducing the number of installations on the tundra. Pipelines are now built 5 ft. above the surface to allow animals to pass beneath. A truck leaking a pint of transmission fluid is treated as an oil spill, reported as such and laboriously cleaned up. Even so, there are limits. "Drilling for oil is an industrial process," concedes Ronnie Chappell, the main spokesman for BP Amoco on the North Slope. "Some things...
...problem is more basic: his energy policy is mostly just an oil-and-gas policy. He wants to use tax credits to boost domestic oil production, and he has a 10-year, $7.1 billion plan that includes drilling for petroleum on 1.5 million acres of protected Alaskan tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But those ideas--the second one hugely controversial--would take years to have an effect, and even then wouldn't ease the electricity crunch. Bush's goal of eliminating regulations that impede the construction of refineries, pipelines, plants and transmission lines would help someday...
...provide exemptions to the Clean Air Act for oil refineries and repeal the law that regulates pesticides in foods. But often these issues were merely deferred, not settled. Most visible is the case of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), 19.6 million acres of pristine tundra in northeast Alaska populated by vast herds of caribou and other wildlife. Clinton vetoed a 1995 bid by Republicans to open the refuge for oil drilling. But despite strong campaigning from conservationists, he never gave the 1.5 million-acre ANWR coastal plain the protection of national-monument status. While...