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Drilling in Sensitive Areas
This week is a pivotal one in Congress for the future of the nation's sensitive lands and coastal waters. Tell your elected representatives to stand firm when they are asked to turn over special areas to the oil industry. Please add your own comments to our letter below, then click "Send this Message." If you need additional information click on "Tell me More," below.
Dear [ Decision Maker ] , As a constituent, I am writing to urge you to stand firm and reject calls to hand over more of America's sensitive lands and coasts to oil and gas companies. Polling data shows a majority of Americans believe new drilling would enrich oil companies rather than benefit consumers, and 76 percent support new technology development over drilling. Like most Americans, I am concerned about high gas prices. But I also believe that the Bush administration and the oil and gas industry have manipulated these very real concerns into a misleading campaign aimed at opening more protected public lands and waters to drilling. I don't believe that handing the industry more of our public lands is any sort of solution to high gas prices, and I hope you agree. I ask you to reject opening more of our nation's coastal waters to drilling, accelerating leasing in Alaskan waters, or sacrificing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a quest for more oil. I also hope you will strongly oppose allowing the Bush Administration to develop a commercial oil shale development program that poses unknown, and potentially catastrophic consequences. More drilling is a false solution to today's high energy prices. I hope you will demonstrate your leadership by working to promote policies that address energy speculation, increase vehicle fuel economy and energy efficiency, and speed the use of renewable technologies. These are the policy solutions that will move this country toward a sound and sustainable energy future.
Sincerely, |
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| Background Information |
Appealing to consumer panic, the oil industry and its friends in Congress and the Administration say that if we just open more public lands and coastal waters to drilling, gas prices will go down and the country will gain energy independence.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are the facts:
Offshore drilling:
The oil industry and its allies in Congress and the Administration are pushing to lift the decades-old ban on offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but according to the government's Energy Information Administration (EIA), "[B]ecause oil prices are determined on the international market...any impact on average wellhead prices [from drilling in these areas] is expected to be insignificant." Furthermore, such drilling could have severe impacts for some of our most sensitive protected areas and coastal tourist economies.
Oil shale:
The industry itself says the technology to develop commercial oil shale is many years, if not decades away. There are too many technological, economic and environmental questions that need to be resolved before oil shale could make any contribution to our energy needs. Relief at the pump will not come any time soon from oil shale development, if ever.
According to the United States Geological Survey, hundreds of billions of barrels of oil equivalent locked in oil shale deposits are already controlled by private companies, none of which have yet managed to develop a successful commercial oil shale project on these lands.
Extracting oil from this rock requires tremendous amounts of electricity and more water than the proposed arid region has to offer. Just this week, the Bureau of Land Management concluded that the socioeconomic and environmental costs associated with oil shale development are likely to be "quite large."
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:
Experts say drilling in the Arctic Refuge would not lower gas prices in the near future, nor would it ever make an appreciable difference in world oil prices.
According to the federal government's Energy Information Administration (EIA), if oil were discovered in commercial quantities in the Arctic Refuge, it would take at least 10 years for any of that oil to flow. At peak production, in 2030, gas prices would drop by only a few pennies per gallon.
However, the pristine landscape of this world-renowned wildlife refuge would be transformed permanently into an industrial landscape of airstrips, gravel pits, roads, drill pads, and pipelines that would sprawl across 1.5 million acres.
Real causes of high fuel prices:
Today's high gasoline prices come from a host of economic conditions that have little to do with how much drilling is or is not taking place on federal lands. Economic experts say these conditions include the weak dollar, prices driven up by energy speculators, the Iraq war and dramatically increased demand from China and India.
Only the oil industry benefits from more drilling:
In 2007, oil industry profits topped $155 billion. In the first quarter of 2008, the five largest oil companies recorded profits of $36.9 billion, even as American families struggled with prices at the pump. "Independence" from foreign oil is a myth. The United States possesses less than three percent of the world's oil, yet the country uses nearly 25 percent of world oil supplies.
Our domestic supply will never be able to keep up with our excessive domestic demand for oil.
Real solutions:
To solve the problem of high gas prices, we must move toward national policies that get at the root causes of high energy prices. Addressing energy speculation is an important first step. We must also speed fuel efficient vehicles to market, reward energy conservation, and develop renewable energy sources.
In the past three years, conservation and new technologies have cut our projected need for oil through 2050 by 100 billion barrels. With a positive impact far greater than that of drilling our protected lands and waters, these approaches must continue to be our focus as a nation.
