by Terri Buchman

American families are struggling in the Bush economy. Many American workers are finding it harder and harder to get the family budget to stretch far enough to cover monthly costs in housing, student loans, food and energy prices. Energy costs, especially the price of a tank of gasoline, is difficult for working families to budget around. The soaring price of gas is squeezing up the price of nearly everything else.

The Republicans are trotting out their old standby that somehow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will magically ease the energy problems America is facing. An amendment to open ANWR to drilling is once again on the floor of the US Senate. Recently USA Today wrote about the claims by the Bush Administrators that if ANWR had been opened to drilling in 2002 that the price of oil would somehow be far less today.

“Even if oil was flowing, it would be too small amount to reduce the price” of crude or gasoline, said Daniel Weiss, energy expert at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington.

“President Bush’s claim ignores the primary causes behind record high oil prices: a cheap dollar, high demand from China and India, and speculators driving the price up. Drilling and sullying the Arctic would not address any of these causes of high oil prices,” said Weiss.

Pretending that ANWR is some sort of magical solution to high gas prices is misleading at best. America needs a consistent and practical energy policy that invests in real and sustainable solutions. Sen. Kerry wrote about the ANWR debate in 2005 and his answer is as relevant to today’s debate as it was when ANWR came up for a vote then.

This fight is as critical as it is symbolic. Roads, pipelines, and other developments would irreversibly damage this national treasure. President Bush and pro-drilling forces cite special-interest junk science to argue that they can limit the damage by drilling in only 2,000 acres. But oil is scattered throughout the refuge, so drilling in 2,000 acres could mean 40 separate 50-acre footprints. Even they know the line they’re selling is bunk.

We can counter this by telling the truth about our energy future. We import 2.5 million barrels of oil from the politically toxic Middle East every day, and our consumption of foreign oil has risen to 55 percent. I don’t want fragile and often unfriendly regimes to hold America’s energy security in their hands, but we need to remind a country weary of conflict in the Middle East that drilling in the Arctic won’t make a dent in our oil dependence. The U.S. Geological Survey has concluded that there are only 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil in ANWR. That amounts to just a six-month supply for the U.S. Irreversibly damaging a truly wild place is an unacceptable price to pay for such a small payoff.

We can’t drill our way to energy independence. We have to invent our way there, by harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit that made our country great. We can conserve energy and make our cars run farther on a gallon of gas. We can increase our investment in clean-energy products and create hundreds of thousands of jobs along the way. What we can’t do is buy into the myth that America’s energy future lies under the snow of ANWR.

UPDATE: The US Senate voted NOT to pass an amendment put up by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow drilling in ANWR. The May 13, 2008 vote against the amendment was 42-56.