Drilling in Alaska a “No-Brainer”

From Chris Woodward's column on OneNewsNow:

"What's so terrible about this is that if Bill Clinton had just let this go through in 1995, we would've probably had close to a million barrels of oil coming out of ANWR by 2005," says Marlo Lewis, senior fellow for the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). "And if Congress had gotten its act together in 2005, we might have some real oil production going in just a couple of years."

ANWR has been the subject of intense debate, pitting environmentalists on one side and various groups on the other. But as in years past, the CEI expert explains that there is no environmental concern; groups who argue otherwise have just been using ANWR as a fundraising vehicle. "The part that actually would be drilled would be the size of Dulles International Airport — out of a million acres," he reports. But Lewis submits that ANWR is needed now more than ever, as the U.S. is at a point where if the volume of oil running through the Trans Alaska Pipeline gets any lower, "we may have to stop the pipeline altogether."

"So not developing ANWR oil could actually reduce our access to oil that's already being developed in Alaska," he concludes. "This is a no-brainer — just as the Keystone XL pipeline is a no-brainer."