The War on ANWR
I got a missive from John Kerry today (he often sends me emails, updating me on what he's up to and always asking to borrow a little more money), noting that he was teaming up with Washington Senator Maria Cantwell to try to block a sneak attack amendment to a budget proposal. Here's the scoop from Ari Berman at The Nation

Republicans have shrewdly attached the ANWR proposal to Bush's $2.6 trillion 2006 budget bill, which cannot be filibustered and requires only a majority of Senators for passage. In March 2003 Democrats and moderate Republicans blocked the same tactic by a slim 52-48 vote. But an expanded Republican majority has unfortunately improved the provision's prospects. Last Thursday the Senate Budget Committee upheld the ANWR amendment on a 12-10 party line vote. "We're a few votes short of what we need," Senator Barbara Boxer told Reuters. "We're hanging by a thread here." The Senate could approve Bush's budget--and the ANWR drilling--later this week.

So, playing devil's advocate, what (aside from environmental effects) should stop us from doing this? Here's more from Ari:

[D]rilling in "America's Serengeti"--as conservationists dub the wildlife refuge--would increase world oil reserves by only 0.3 percent, a margin too miniscule to significantly lower US oil imports or reduce the world price. Moreover, it will take ten years for that oil to reach the US market. At peak projection levels in 2027, ANWR would satisfy less than 2 percent of America's expected oil consumption. Maybe that's why big oil companies--who've contributed $4.4 million to Bush's two presidential campaigns--have stopped lobbying for ANWR's passage. "The enthusiasm of government officials about ANWR exceeds that of industry," Wayne Kelley, a former petroleum engineer for Halliburton and managing director of the oil consulting firm RSK, told The New York Times last month. "The evidence so far about ANWR is not promising." Lee Raymond, chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, the company that stands to gain the most from opening up the Refuge, remarked last December: "I don't know if there's anything in ANWR or not."

The NYTimes editorial board has a few more things to add:

The numbers tell the story. The United States Geological Survey's best guess is that even at today's record-high prices - in excess of $50 a barrel - just under 7 billion barrels could profitably be brought to market. That's less than the 7.3 billion barrels this country now consumes in a year. At peak production - about 1 million barrels a day in 2020 or 2025 - the refuge would supply less than 4 percent of the country's projected daily needs. Any number of modest efficiencies could achieve the same result without threatening the refuge. Simply closing the so-called S.U.V. loophole - making light trucks as efficient over all as ordinary cars - would save a million barrels a day. Increasing fuel-economy standards for cars by about 50 percent, to 40 miles per gallon, a perfectly reasonable expectation, would save 2.5 million barrels a day. And bipartisan commissions have offered even bigger ideas: tax credits to help automakers produce a whole new generation of fuel-efficient cars, for instance, or an aggressive biofuels program that would seek to replace one-quarter of the gasoline we use for cars with substitutes from agricultural products. These programs would yield benefits - less dependency on foreign sources, a decrease in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - long after the last drop of oil had been extracted from the refuge.

What does our President and his minions have against a bunch of caribou and muskoxen and why can't they see that a sensible and forward-looking energy policy could actually be beneficial to business (to which they are so beholden).