About Face on ANWR
The elite media have a short-term memory.

By Michael Catanzaro, a reporter for Robert Novak.
April 9, 2001 12:30 p.m.

arely do the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post deviate from left-wing orthodoxy. So when they do, it's worth noting, especially on such a politically charged matter as the environment. In this case, it's opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil and gas drilling, which for leftist greens is worthy of excommunication from the Church of Gaia.

The Times and Post currently propound the apocalyptic nonsense that ANWR will drive indigenous caribou and endangered species to extinction, will inevitably lead to another Exxon Valdez oil spill, and generally will despoil the pristine wilderness. They also believe that pipelines and oil rigs arrayed against undisturbed pastures of wilderness are aesthetically offensive (even though ANWR, one of the most remote places on Earth, is, except for a few months, covered in ice).

But both papers (surprisingly) at one time argued against these shibboleths. Not so long ago, scribes at the Times and Post penned some astonishing editorials in which they debunked with eloquence and common sense the arguments that they so enthusiastically champion today.

In 1988, the Times and Post supported the recommendation of Reagan Interior Secretary Don Hodel that opening ANWR could reap immense benefits with little or no environmental damage. Which is the same argument, in fact, made by President Bush and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Frank Murkowski (R., Alaska).

The Times, in an editorial on June 2, 1988, wrote with clear sense: "… the potential [of ANWR] is enormous and the environmental risks are modest … the likely value of the oil far exceeds plausible estimates of the environmental costs." "Some member of Congress," the Times continued, "believe that no damage at all is acceptable. But most are ready to accept a little environmental degradation in return for a lot of oil," and that "… it is hard to see why absolutely pristine preservation of this remote wilderness should take precedence over the nation's energy needs."

The Times also heaped expansive praise on oil drilling in Prudhoe Bay and Alaska's North Slope. "The North Slope development has been America's biggest test by far of the proposition that it is possible to balance energy needs with sensitivity for the environment," it wrote in 1988.

On March 30, a year later, the Times dismissed the Exxon Valdez oil spill as a pretext for leaving ANWR untouched. "…Washington can't afford … to treat the [Exxon Valdez] accident as a reason for fencing off what may be the last great oilfield in the nation."

Is this the work of a Times impersonator? For such words simply cannot be squared with this anti-drilling screed written on Jan. 31 of this year: "… Mr. Bush's plan to open [ANWR] is as environmentally unsound and intellectually shaky as it was when Ronald Reagan suggested it 20 years ago and when Mr. Bush's father suggested it a decade ago."

The Times wrote with its usual self-righteous indignation that "it is outrageous for [supporters of opening ANWR] to clamor for access to the pristine lands of the refuge at a time when they have barely begun to tap the significant resources in areas of far less ecological value."

But here is the real kicker: "Finally, as this page has noted many times before, the relatively trivial amounts of recoverable oil in the refuge cannot possibly justify the potential corruption of a unique and irreplaceable natural area."

Apparently the Post editorial board also experienced a similar road-to-Damascus-type conversion, or was simply hijacked by the Birkenstock brigade. The Post wrote last December 25th in an editorial titled "Protect the Refuge" that Bush "would have a hard case to make" in proving that "the oil to be gained [from ANWR] is worth the potential damage to this unique, wild, and biologically vital ecosystem."

Yet in 1987, the Post could not have been more emphatic in exposing the myths propagated about ANWR by the environmental left. It wrote that ANWR "is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on surrounding life…."

Back then, the Post believed that the rich reserves of ANWR could decrease America's dependence on foreign oil, which, it argued, would create sound environmental policies. "But if less is to be produced here in the United States, more will have to come from other countries," it wrote on April 4, 1989. "The effect will be to move oil spills to other shores. As a policy to protect the global environment, that's not very helpful."

These dramatic shifts in opinion show that the editors of the Times and Post are being intellectually dishonest, and just plain absurd. Even if the nation's energy situation had markedly improved over the years — which it clearly has not; it is much, much worse — that would not reconcile the contradiction that ANWR is both "pristine" and "biologically vital" at one moment and bleak and remote in another. ANWR is and always has been bleak and remote.

The nation's energy woes — most dramatically on display in California — make drilling in ANWR, which holds 6 to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil, an economic necessity. But that doesn't trouble the world's leading newspapers, which apparently value ideological purity over truth.