ANWR (& Alaska) Under Attack Again

From the Anchorage Daily News:

WASHINGTON -- If there were any doubts about the President Barack Obama's opinion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the White House dispelled them Monday, on the 50th anniversary of one of the country's most powerful symbols of wilderness.

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Pro-development forces and environmentalists have been divided for decades about the future of the refuge's northernmost swath -- the coastal plain. The anniversary of its founding, along with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, has reignited the debate.

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A Republican-controlled House will be more likely to approve legislation allowing drilling in ANWR's coastal plain. But even if legislation also passed in the Senate, the president most likely would veto it, Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said Monday. 

"I'll introduce my bill, as usual," Young said. "But the reality is, it's not going to get out of the Senate, and the reality is, Obama's not going to sign it. I'm realistic. I've done this 11 times." 

The reality is that this uninhabited, frozen marsh & swampland, north of the Arctic Circle, may be declared a national monument - the same tactic that the Federal government has used so often in the recent past to gobble up huge swaths of state-owned land all over the western United States. 

The environmentalists would have you believe that there is a crying need to protect "the wildlife" in that area, and the truth be damned.  But the fact is that ANWR is a region through which caribou herds migrate ... and the drilling which has been proposed for those lands occupy an area -well, let's tell the truth, shall we? (I know that's a foreign concept to the tree-huggers, but let's keep it real. There are few trees in ANWR, anyway. It's almost entirely tundra grasses.)

If ANWR were a basketball court, then the proposed drilling site bears the relative size of a postage stamp on that court. And direct observation, for the record, has shown that the caribou herds which migrate across lands where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) is above ground, have increased in numbers since TAPS was built.