Arctic Drilling Plan Finds a Spot in Senate Budget Bill

A key Senate committee on Wednesday advanced a measure that would achieve President Bush’s long-sought goal of opening a portion of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

“This has been a long time coming,” Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said after the panel voted to include authorization of the energy exploration in a budget bill.

But the drilling initiative, which environmentalists strongly oppose, still could be thwarted by an issue unrelated to the decades-old dispute: a fight over federal spending cuts.

Drilling proponents have hoped the measure would finally become law because, by attaching it to the budget bill, it would be immune to the filibusters that have previously blocked energy exploration in the refuge.

But that was before Hurricane Katrina struck, setting off a fight in Congress over spending cuts to pay for rebuilding the Gulf Coast.

Now the fate of Arctic drilling is tied to a budget-cutting bill that has run into trouble and might not pass.

In a sign of the changed political terrain, environmental lobbyists on Wednesday were talking about threatened cuts to Medicaid and student loans almost as much as the caribou they say would be endangered by Arctic drilling.

Their goal: to present as many reasons as possible to coax lawmakers, especially moderate Republicans, to vote against the budget bill.

“It’s a massive bill that’s going to be really hard to pass,” said Melinda Pierce, a Sierra Club lobbyist.

Domenici conceded as much. He predicted a close vote when the budget bill goes to the Senate, perhaps early next month.

The budget bill also could face trouble in the House.

Drilling supporters fear that a developing rift between the House and Senate over the size of spending cuts could doom the budget measure -- and with it the Arctic drilling proposal.

In a sign of the uncertainty, House Republican leaders on Wednesday backed down from scheduling a vote today on a measure calling for $50 billion in spending cuts over the next five years, instead of the previously planned $35 billion.

The House leaders feared they lacked the votes to pass the increased spending cuts.

The Senate energy committee authorized adding the Arctic drilling to the budget bill on a 13-9 vote.

Domenici argued that exploration in the refuge was needed more than ever, citing high gasoline prices and hurricane damage to Gulf Coast oil facilities.

“We must produce more of our own oil and we must diversify the places where we produce it,” he said.

Foes of the drilling proposal have contended that it would spoil a national environmental treasure and endanger wildlife while doing little to bring down gasoline prices because it would be years before the oil could reach the marketplace.

About 10 billion barrels lie beneath the refuge’s tundra. The U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the committee’s ranking Democrat, opposed the drilling, saying, “Not one drop of oil will come from the Arctic refuge for 10 years.”

He added that government estimates showed that production from the refuge would, at its peak, reduce reliance on oil importation by only 4 percentage points, from 68% to 64% in 2025.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a committee member, also voted against the measure, saying the drilling would occur in the “ecological heart of the refuge, the center of wildlife activity, and the home to nearly 200 wildlife species, including polar bears, musk oxen and caribou.”

“It is clear to me that drilling would not give us energy security and would, in fact, carry huge environmental costs,” Feinstein said.

Drilling supporters said the measure would limit the production site to 2,000 acres of the 19.6-million-acre refuge and restrict drilling to the winter. They say these restrictions would significantly reduce its environmental effects.

But Peter Rafle, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society, contended that the measure would open about 1.5 million acres of the refuge to energy exploration because of loopholes in the legislation.