Arctic Drilling: Self-Help or Self-Delusion?

Re “Limited Arctic Drilling Won’t Harm Caribou, Scientists Say,” April 8: What a travesty! After 12 years, the U.S. Geological Survey produced a report about caribou that was damaging to the Bush administration’s proposal to destroy the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So it was told to go back and do it over and come up with the right answer. So, of course they did, in seven days! (And what about the grizzlies, polar bears, birds, musk oxen and the rest of the animals?)

Do the Bush administration and Interior Secretary Gale Norton believe that the American public can swallow such opportunistic hypocrisy? Can we, the public, ever believe anything that the Bush people tell us?

Harold D. Watkins

Studio City

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Your story reports that the Alaskan caribou would not be decimated by drilling for oil in the ANWR, and now we hear that Iraq is cutting off its supply of oil for a month in protest of our position on the Middle East (April 9). This brilliant move to raise oil prices is exquisitely timed to hurt our recovering economy just as Americans were finally finding more jobs. Furthermore, American dollars spent to buy Middle Eastern oil are used to support the very terrorists who kill us.

We could bring an end to this paradox by producing our own oil in Alaska. When will we ever be free of the tyranny of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and America’s environmentalists?

James Bonorris

Los Angeles