Republicans float new plan to drill Alaska refuge
Date: 04-Oct-02
Country: USA
Author: Chris Baltimore
Progress by Senate and House negotiators has slowed to a standstill on the energy bill, which aims to promote domestic production, encourage conservation and boost renewable energy sources.
Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling was a divisive, and possibly the decisive issue, in the negotiations.
Drilling in ANWR was a prime goal for House Republican negotiators and President George W. Bush, a former Texas oilman. They contend access to the oil is needed more than ever because of potential U.S. military strikes against Iraq.
Senate Democrats on the negotiating team were rock-solid against it because of potential harm to the environment on Alaska's northern coast.
Rep. Billy Tauzin, Louisiana Republican and chairman of the conference committee, wants to complete work by early next week at the latest, so Congress could vote on the bill before adjourning for the year in mid-October.
Without an agreement, the bill will die when Congress adjourns.
HOUSE WON'T GIVE UP ANWR
Texas Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican and a leader in crafting the House bill, warned Senate negotiators "the House is not fundamentally going to roll over" on ANWR.
If the Senate was not willing to compromise, "let's be honest and call the conference off," Barton said during a committee meeting.
Tauzin said lawmakers and their staff workers were in "very deep and intricate negotiations" over several issues, including ANWR. He said he hoped to complete work during a Thursday session on research, ethanol and electricity provisions.
Asked by reporters if it was time to drop ANWR from the bill, Tauzin said, "I'm not ready to abandon that effort."
During Wednesday's session, the House offered to designate an additional 10.2 million acres in the 19 million-acre (7.7 million hectare) ANWR as wilderness, which would bar most forms of development. Some 7.2 million acres (2.9 million ha) were already protected as wilderness.
Such a move would be the "single largest designation of wilderness ever made in the history of this country," Tauzin said. Those lands would be a "totally, permanently off-limits area" to future oil drilling, Tauzin said.
In exchange, Democrats must accept drilling on 2,000 acres (800 ha) of the coastal plain at the northern tip, Tauzin said.
Senate Democrats made no immediate reply to House offer, but have previously said they would reject any drilling.
ANWR holds a potential 16 billion barrels of oil - a volume equal to the amount of crude the United States imports from foreign countries for five years. The refuge is also home to polar bears, caribou and other wildlife, which has turned it into a rallying point for environmental opposition.
The 2,000-acre limit only includes land covered by actual oil production facilities, said a spokesman for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Other infrastructure needed to support drilling operations like pipelines and roads could turn the area into a "spider web of development," he said.
CLIMATE CHANGE STANDOFF
House Republicans are strongly opposed to Senate Democrats' attempt to insert climate change provisions into the energy package. The Senate in April passed legislation which creates a voluntary system to track heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are linked to global warming and rising ocean levels.
Climate change policy should be "the flip side of energy policy," because burning coal and other hydrocarbons creates air pollution which threatens the environment, said New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy panel.
Tauzin called the provisions "extraordinarily objectionable" and warned they would create a "regulatory treadmill of baselines."
But House Republicans signaled a willingness to give on climate change if their opponents soften on ANWR drilling.
Climate change is "a non-starter until we get some movement on some other things that are pending," Barton said in an apparent reference to
