@danon5,
The Curious Don Young
Say this for Congressman Don Young: He is thoroughly predictable and, on energy and environmental matters, almost always wrong.
For the last 38-plus years, Mr. Young, Republican of Alaska, has specialized in bringing copious pork dollars to his home state. He is also unmatched as a fountain of dubious ideas — unnecessary roads through protected wildlife refuges, clear-cutting in old-growth forests like the Tongass, and not one but two infamous “bridges to nowhere” that would have provided access to thinly populated parts of Alaska at gigantic cost.
Now comes another effort by Mr. Young to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling — specifically, the refuge’s coastal plain, a narrow 1.6 million-acre wilderness that flanks the Beaufort Sea and is home to caribou, polar bears, wolves and dozens of rare arctic bird species. Bruce Babbitt, the former interior secretary, once said that opening the plain to drilling would be as insulting as building a hyrdroelectric dam in the Grand Canyon.
What’s interesting about Mr. Young’s renewed advocacy is that drilling in the refuge — a hot subject of a debate in the 1990s — has receded from public discussion. Even the oil companies seem less interested in drilling there than they once were. One reason is that more and more oil and gas discoveries have been made elsewhere, in less forbidding and less sensitive places. And the Senate has never wanted to subject the refuge to the environmental damage that drilling would bring.
Yet Mr. Young persists, even though the new five-year drilling plan of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would open large swaths of this country’s outer continental shelf tonew exploration, including some of the waters off Alaska. But Mr. Salazar will not recommend opening the refuge; his Fish and Wildlife Service wants to give it permanent wilderness protection, putting it beyond the drillers’ reach. That’s what rankles Don Young. And, in a curious way, keeps him going.
