What unmitigated bull.

ANWR is an area comprising 19 million, 600 thousand (19,600,000) acres. The area within it needed for oil production is a piddling 2,000 acres--0.01 percent of the total! That's like a small dot on the corner of a post card. They always show us a picture of a beautiful green valley with mountains overlooking and a stream running through it to represent what we would be "destroying" if we drill in Alaska. Only one problem: that's not where we would be drilling. That's like showing a picture of the Grand Canyon when the drilling site would be in the unreachable part of the Mojave Desert.

The area in which we would be drilling is a land where nothing can live. Not even the caribou go there if they can avoid it. It is barren and there's nothing there but frozen mud and rocks. It's like a cold desert. Nobody lives there because nobody in his right mind would want to live there. It's one of those areas Rush Limbaugh describes as an area where God put the oil for us to find without destroying anything important. Limbaugh says: "God is begging us to go get the oil. He is saying, 'Why do you think I put the oil there? I put it here so nothing else would stop you when you're going to get it.'"

These tactics are like their usual tactics everywhere: twist facts, lie through your teeth, misrepresent, do anything you can to fool people into believing your lies. Destroy "God's most awesome creations?" Not even! Most of the areas where there is demonstrated to be oil are areas where no one lives, no one could live, and where no one would live, and mostly would ever go. Further, drilling in these places would destroy nothing. Any temporary dislocation can easily be fixed, and quickly, leaving only a few oil pumps, and this is out in the wilderness.

From this land nobody wants, we could extract an estimated 6 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil, and it's on American soil. And the people who live there [in Alaska] want it! Wharton Econometrics Forecasting Associates estimates that drilling in ANWR would create about 736,000 jobs. The Teamsters like it, and 75% of Alaskans, including the Inupiat Eskimos, like it. It could be a big economic boon for Alaska.

The best part is that ANWR is just one place in America where the liberals in the environmental movement have prevented us from dtilling. In just this one place, we could get enough oil to replace all the oil we import from Iraq for the next 20 years, or from Saudi Arabia for the next 30! Enough to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by half! From one source.

OPEC, the Arab oil cartel, created massive shortages in the United States in 1973 (when we were only importing 35% of our oil--now we import 52%), and they did it on purpose. They could do it again. If they did, and if it continued for a long time, do us enough damage to make the WTC disaster look like a walk in the park. We're "at the mercy" of people who hate us with a passion and who supply us with oil to get the money they need to finance the terrorism with which to hurt us.

From these people we import more than half of our oil. From countries where most of people hate us with a passion. If you doubt that, think about this:

Saudi Arabia was the primary founder of the Taliban. Fifteen of the hijackers were Saudis, and Saudi Arabia allowed fund raising for Osama bin Laden--on the condition that he didn't use it to attack the Saudi regime. As the New York Times recently reported, the 10th. grade textbook for one of the five required religion classes taught in all Saudi public schools states: "It is compulsory for the Muslims to be loyal to each other and to consider infidels their enemy." According to columnist Thomas Friedman, "This hostile view of non-Muslims, which is particularly pronounced in the strict Saudi Wahhabi brand of Islam, is reinforced through Saudi sermons, television shows and on the Internet." He also noted that there is an Islamist element incubating religious hostility toward America and the West, particularly among disaffected, unemployed Saudi youth.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein is manufacturing "weapons of mass destruction" as fast as he can. He engineered the bouncing of the UN inspectors so we couldn't catch him at it. Among those are the powder for distributing anthrax all through the world. He is suspected of being the mastermind of the scheme to distribute it to America as well as being the "top dog" in the scheme to destroy the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (with bin Laden being simply one of his principal subordinates and the Taliban as part of the scheme).

Continuing to depend on these people for this much of a substance that is so important to our very survival is folly! Alaska is just one area where we could extract enough oil to supply us for years, and most are not in areas where they will cause problems. They're miles offshore, or they're in an inhospitable place where nobody could, or would, live. Environmental pictures of those areas as "pristine wilderness" that would be destroyed are not only wrong, they're intentionally wrong. They lie routinely to stop us from drilling on American soil. They don't care about the environment, so long as the drilling is done in somebody else's country. It's "NIMBY writ large."

About Alaska they say: "It would take ten years to bring Arctic oil to market and, when it arrives, it would never equal more than two percent of all the oil we consume each year." That's a lie. Yes, it will take several years to bring the oil to market--all the more reason we should start now. But according to Interior Secretary Gail Norton in a Washington Times editorial October 31, 2001, a conservative estimate of the amount of oil that ANWR would produce is 7.7 billion barrels, an amount equal to about 20 years of imports from Iraq. But ANWR production could potentially replace half of what we import from all of the Persian Gulf [region] for 36 years or all of what we import from the Saudis for the next 30 years.

The same liberals hate the Sports Utility Vehicle, which they say uses up too much fuel, increasing the "oil shortage problem." But the "oil shortage problem" is only in their imagination. Again they're pushing policies that kill people and cost money. The SUV is safer because it's bigger. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) studied the relationship between size and safety and found in the 11 car models that were downsized since 1977, occupant death rates were higher in 10 of the 11 car models after downsizing. New, smaller cars were averaging 23% more deaths than the larger models (for more information on mlieage standards and safety, visit The Coalition for Vehicle Choice's "The Safety Impact of Increasing Automotive Fuel Economy Standards.").

It's a fact that if we continue to depend on the Islamic world for our oil, we're going to one day have a real oil shortage. At this moment, since oil prices are currently low because of the market forces, OPEC is meeting with a view toward cutting production to force the cost of oil up from $25 a barrel to $25 a barrel so as to manipulate oil prices world wide. They'd like for it to be $2 to $3 a gallon. That's more money in their pockets to use in supporting, training, and motivating terrorists into doing more things like the WTC, the Pentagon, and the anthrax scare.

I'd like to get the whole world using synthetic oil because I sell it. But there is another reason beyond the good things it would do in your car--if enough people used it, no matter who they get it from, the less fossil oil we would use. The less fossil oil we use, the less we are forced to import from people who only want to hurt us. But I don't think that's going to happen, at least not in my lifetime. So the only other thing we can do is to go back to drilling in our own country, where we control the distribution. That's yhe only way we'll ever be free of the "Middle-Eastern Factor" in our oil policy.

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