The new administration, as well as the oil industry, has used the California energy crisis to justify steps to ease restrictions on air pollution and other environmental regulations on energy corporations and to push for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on Alaska's North Slope. Opening up the ANWR, which lies just east of the country's largest oil-producing field, Prudhoe Bay in northeastern Alaska, is a central provision in the Senate bill, introduced by Frank Murkowski of Alaska, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

"The situation in California has made it possible where there may be enough of a change in the political mind-set to begin [oil exploring] in the North Slope," William Kovacs, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the Los Angeles Times.

Congress established the 19-million acre ANWR in 1980. This ecologically diverse area has been called the "biological heart" of the largest assemblage of protected ecosystems in the world. It is home to more than 180 species of birds, bears, musk ox, wolves, moose, foxes, and sheep. The coastal plain of the ANWR is also the nursery grounds for the Porcupine River caribou herd.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there are between 4.3 billion and 11.8 billion barrels of oil available under the ANWR using current technology, which is about one year or two years' worth of domestic usage. The North Slope also holds about 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which is controlled by British Petroleum, Phillips Petroleum, and ExxonMobil. The United States currently consumes about 21.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year. These three companies are currently conducting a study to determine the feasibility of building a gas pipeline that would run from Prudhoe Bay to link up with gas infrastructure in North America.  
 
Impact on indigenous people
The debate on Arctic drilling has intensified in the state of Alaska as well. Many of the state's residents depend on royalties and other revenues generated from the oil and gas industry. Annual dividends from the state's Permanent Fund--royalties the state receives from the huge North Slope oil operations--are paid out to every state resident. Last fall this check came to $1,963.86, the largest dividend ever. Alaska has no state income tax or sales tax; oil revenues finance about 84 percent of the state's budget.

In addition to Murkowski's proposed legislation, which will be a windfall for the energy monopolies, the state government is doing its part to keep profits flowing to the oil companies. In March, the state's finance committee cut in half the amount of money allocated to pay nurses at the state-run Pioneers nursing homes. Instead, the budget for Arctic Power, a private group lobbying for drilling in the arctic refuge, was expanded.

Arctic Power describes itself as "a grassroots, nonprofit citizen's organization" formed "to expedite congressional and presidential approval of oil exploration and production within the Coastal Plain of the ANWR." But this "grassroots" group is dominated by the likes of the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce, the state's Resource Development Council, the Alaska Trucking Association, and the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.

The outfit claims residents of the town of Kaktovik, "the only people living on the Coastal Plain of ANWR, support oil and gas development in their 'back yard.' Alaska's indigenous people have benefited greatly from North Slope production." The city of Kaktovik, the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, the Alaskan Federation of Natives, and individual Iñupiat officials have endorsed "development" in the ANWR, according to Arctic Power.

Kaktovik is the major settlement of the Iñupiat Eskimos, who live along the northern coastal plain. The Iñupiat were forced to rebuild the town in the 1950s after the U.S. government destroyed it to make room for a military installation. They fought attempts by the oil companies to set up another local government, the North Slope Borough, and lost. According to Joel Pollak, who wrote "Barrels and Bowheads," an article on the conflicts of native peoples around exploitation of oil resources in Alaska, the Iñupiat "leaders consistently ask that local people be given more power over controlling the pace and extent of development, but their demands are usually ignored by industry and government."

The oil companies have also sought to win over the Iñupiat leadership to support their plans through such means as hiring residents to work in their offices and public relations staffs, all-expense paid trips to Anchorage to meet with company executives, and visits to oil fields of Louisiana to showcase how supposedly safe and clean this industrial activity can be. But the success of this campaign has had its limits.

In 1999 the Iñupiat filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco against BP Amoco's Northstar Project. The company seeks to construct the first offshore drilling venture proposed in the Arctic, in which it would construct an artificial island six miles off Alaska's north coast. Oil would be drilled, then transported ashore, in a pipeline only six feet beneath the seabed. The Iñupiat still oppose the oil industry's plans to drill offshore in the Beaufort and Chuckchi Seas because of concerns over the impact on whaling and fishing.

Less talked about are the other people in the area, the Gwich'in Indians who live inland south of the coastal mountains. The northernmost Indian Nation, the Gwich'in live in 15 small villages scattered across Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada. There are about 7,000 Gwich'in who live near the migratory route of the 129,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd. With little cash income, the Gwich'in rely heavily on these caribou for sustenance and, according to press reports, many feel that development would negatively impact the environment, the caribou, and therefore their ability to economically survive. In 1988 the Gwich'in people passed a resolution against development in the calving grounds of the caribou herd in the ANWR, and for permanent protection against drilling in the coastal plain. "There's no technology in the world that will make it safe for mothers and their calves," Gwich'in elder Sarah James explained.

Ken Boyd, director of the state's Division of Oil and Gas, offered another view. "You fly into [the town of] Deadhorse, and there are caribou all over the place. They're on the runway. These animals can adapt. This idea that they'll drop dead because they see oil production going on, it's just nuts."

But the Gwich'in Steering Committee has explained that on the North Slope, 95 percent of which has already been drilled, developed, leased, or explored by Big Oil, some "43,000 tons of nitrogen oxides pollute the air every year...hundreds of spills involving tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil, other petroleum products and hazardous waste occur annually; and gravel fill, excavation, and waste disposal alone have destroyed 12,000 acres of wildlife habitat and 508 acres of marine and estuarine habitat." Eight hundred square miles of the North Slope has been transformed into an industrial complex with 500 miles of roads and pipelines, over 150 drilling pads, 1,400 production wells, and three jet airports.

Christine Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the Bush administration's energy proposals from critics. "Nobody wants to drill for oil because of what it might do to the environment," she said. "No one wants oil transmission pipelines because they blow up. No one wants to talk about nuclear energy. Even windmills [can] kill birds because they're in the flyway."

Bill Kalman is a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 120.  
 
 
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