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House Repubs vote to rape Alaska


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House Republicans have voted for the 12th time in as many years to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploitation exploration. They believe that giving oil companies the rights to drill there is some how going to magically drop domestic gas prices. The problem is, it can't. Gas prices in the United States are high because our own oil companies refuse to keep enough refining capacity to keep up with demand here at home, and the reason is very simple: money. If demand exceeds supply, prices go up for consumers, but not the oil companies. Allowing domestic oil companies to supplement their sources from the Middle East and Venezuela with ANWR isn't going to change the fact that they have refused outright to build enough refineries to keep up with demand. Factor in world-wide demand for oil that is beginning, for the first time in history, to outstrip supply, and ANWR quickly looks like nothing but a drop in the bucket, or barrel, as would seem more appropriate.

There's also the limited supply problem. Conservative estimates peg ANWR at holding only about 3 billion barrels of oil that can be salvaged. The U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels per day. Anybody with a brain and a legitimate interest in the truth can do the math. ANWR would be completely drained in about five months at that consumption rate, and even at just 1,000,000 barrels per day, it would be exhausted in just 8 years, and then we're back to square one. At that slow a rate, it's doubtful you'd see gas prices drop by more than a few pennies per gallon. I've also heard people say that it could take anywhere between five to ten years to find the oil, setup all the infrastructure necessary to get it out of the ground, and for it to begin filtering into the market.

All this of course is happening at a time when the Republican lead Congress has just given billions of dollars worth of tax breaks to the big oil companies, even when those same companies have repeatedly gone on record stating that they do not need, and do not want, tax breaks at this time.

The truth is that it's becoming increasingly clear that one of the GOP's primary talking points over the past eight years more accurately reflects their own party than the Democrats. Republicans have no ideas, no plans, no clue whatsoever when it comes to energy policy. ANWR is a tiny supplement to our growing demand that isn't going to let up any time soon, and drilling is likely to cause widespread damage to the environment in one of our very last untouched wildlife refuges, and they are taking billions of your tax dollars and giving them back to the oil companies.

This is not a case of election year politics; no, it's far worse than that. Our government is being run by fumbling incompetents intent on not only destabilizing the Middle East with incessant warmongering, but also destabilizing the home land by favoring trillion dollar multinational corporations over American citizens, whom they have all sworn to hold in their best interests. That just isn't happening.

We are not being protected, we are being raped, and this Fall is your chance to tell the Republican controlled government NO MORE. We as citizens are responsible for placing these people in power, and it is now our responsibility to remove them, before the damage to our environment, our economy, and our lives, becomes irreparable.

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The text of this article is Copyright © 2006,2007 Paul William Tenny. All rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Attribution by: full name and original URL. Comments are copyrighted by their authors and are not subject to the Creative Commons license of the article itself.