Strange Allies Uphold Offshore Drilling Ban : Environment: Republicans bent on repealing other ‘green’ laws find common cause with Democrats in rescuing the 14-year-old moratorium. Observers, though, call their teaming up a political fluke.

So passionate was Rep. Don Young as he decried the evils of oil rigs bobbing off the nation’s coastline, it was hard to remember this was the same Alaska Republican who recently slapped a walrus penis bone in his hand while chatting in his office with a wildlife preservationist. Also there in his office: a whale vertebrae, a moose rack, a brown bearskin and the heads of a deer, a ram and a boar.

There are few lawmakers rated less environmentally friendly than Young and the crew of Republicans from California and Florida who joined him recently in rescuing the 14-year-old moratorium against offshore gas and oil drilling.

The League of Conservation Voters gave them all a zero when scoring their environmental votes in the first 100 days of this Congress, votes that rewrote or rolled back some of the most sweeping environmental laws ever enacted.

But offshore drilling is an issue so visceral that it transcends environmental politics and produces peculiar bedfellows. It puts groups such as the Sierra Club and the San Diego Board of Realtors on the same side of the debate; it makes unlikely allies of California’s most strident environmental groups and some of its most conservative Republicans.

“This probably doesn’t mean these Republicans are going to become greener,” said Andrew Palmer, conservation director for the American Oceans Campaign in Seattle. “But maybe it is the start of them pausing over how far to go.”

The Republican-dominated House has demonstrated its intent to reform environmental laws now decades old, arguing that federal regulations have become abusive, unreasonable and costly. It has passed legislation that amends the landmark Clean Water Act to require that the cost of regulations be considered along with environmental risk, and it seeks to reduce government authority to police private property in the name of preservation. An effort to rewrite the Endangered Species Act is also under way.

But offshore oil drilling is where many reformers draw the line, a posture viewed by Democratic activists as hypocrisy and by Republican lawmakers as common sense.

“I feel like I work with them and I have to take a shower. How can they be doing this?” said Dawn Martin, political director of the American Oceans Campaign in Washington. “Of course we support them when they do something good for the environment. But in the end, you know it is such a hypocritical vote; it is so disingenuous.”

“I am consistent,” asserts Santa Barbara Republican Andrea Seastrand, who voted to revamp the Clean Water Act then lined up against offshore drilling. “Just because you are a Republican and you want to adhere to common-sense regulation does not make you anti-environment.”

Lawmakers who favor reform say environmental legislation that worked two decades ago does not necessarily work today. And rolling back federal laws to give states and cities flexibility to protect their natural resources does not make one an enemy of the environment, they argue.

In their view, it makes perfect fiscal sense both to revamp a Clean Water Act that is now restricting economic growth and to forbid offshore oil derricks that threaten tourist revenue. And the offshore oil debate focused as often on the possible destruction of California’s $27-billion coastal tourist industry as on the prospect of oil-slicked beaches.

“On the oil-drilling moratorium, protection of the environment and protection of the economy are tied hand in hand,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray, a San Diego Republican.

Environmentalism is an issue the GOP all but owned once. Teddy Roosevelt’s conservation campaign marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. The Sierra Club was early on an upper-crust group full of Republicans. The Environmental Protection Agency was established by Richard Nixon.

But the honeymoon ended in the Reagan years when priorities shifted to property rights and development. Environmentalism became partisan. And the partisanship peaked in this Congress, when newly empowered Republicans promised to reduce government and eliminate so-called regulatory nightmares.

“Environmental strategies have been manipulated to justify government intrusion into personal freedom rather than preservation of the quality of life,” said Bilbray, who previously served on the California Coastal Commission, the state Air Resources Board and nearly went to prison for trying to keep Tijuana sewage off his hometown beaches. “Teddy Roosevelt believed in letting the public use the land and appreciate the environment. I’m a Teddy Roosevelt Republican all the way.”

But critics say few Republicans would stand behind the oil drilling moratorium if their wealthy coastal constituents did not demand it, many of them influential donors who prefer their ocean views uncluttered and their beaches clean.

“This vote does not mean these Republicans are green, and they shouldn’t get credit for being green,” one Democratic congressman said. “If they thought there was no price to be paid for voting against the moratorium, they would have done so.”

The drilling battle moves to the House floor this week, where party lines will surely be crossed again, significantly increasing the likelihood that the moratorium will be extended another year. Without Republican support on previous votes, mainstream environmentalists were soundly throttled.

“This is the first vote to come along that the environmental community has a shot at winning,” conceded Palmer of the American Oceans Campaign.

But such improbable alliances are not likely to last when the focus shifts to the Environmental Species Act, or most any other environmental issue Congress decides to re-examine in this session.

“I don’t think this is a trend; I think it’s an anomaly,” said Betsy Loyless, political director of the League of Conservation Voters. “But I’ll take it. It’s one of those happy coincidences where you have environmentalists and . . . some wealthy contributors who don’t care to stare at oil derricks when they are out watching the sunset.”