Copyright 2001 The Omaha World-Herald Company  
Omaha World Herald (Nebraska)
May 10, 2001, Thursday SUNRISE EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. 25; Guest Column

LENGTH: 1172 words

HEADLINE: Discuss Ecology, Energy Rationally

BYLINE: HAROLD W. ANDERSEN

SOURCE: WORLD-HERALD CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

BODY:
Last Sunday I wrote about the current controversy over the allowable level of arsenic in drinking water and suggested that environmental extremists should calm down. The Bush ad-ministration is reviewing the matter, and Vice President Dick Cheney has indicated that the allowable level will be reduced, although not necessarily by 80 percent as the Clinton administration proposed just before leaving office.

Today, an effort to bring some non-emotional consideration to two other controversial environmental issues - issues which environmental activists and some Democrats and liberal editorial writers and columnists can't seem to discuss rationally.

Let's start with the angry accusations that the Bush administration and profiteering oil companies propose to rape the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska through drilling for oil there.

An example of the almost hysterical arguments being spread by environmental activists is a mailing from the Natural Resources Defense Council, including a personal message from movie star Robert Redford. Redford is quoted as warning of "devastating oil development" in the ANWR. Also included in the mailing is a statement that alleges that a significant portion of the refuge "may soon be turned into a vast, polluted oil field."

Let's look at some facts that have been scarcely mentioned in the extensive news coverage and commentary I have read and heard:

The wildlife refuge was established in two steps. The first step was taken in 1960 when a Hastings, Neb., newspaper publisher, Fred A. Seaton, serving as secretary of the Interior in the Eisenhower administration, set aside 8.9 million acres as an "Arctic National Wildlife Range." The second step came during the Carter administration, when Congress in 1980 added approximately 10 million acres and set aside the entire 19 million acres as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Importantly, the 1980 congressional act designated a 1.5-million-acre corner in the coastal plain of the 19-million-acre refuge as an area for possible oil and gas development subject to authorization by a future Congress. It is in this previously designated oil-potential area, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech in Toronto last week, that Congress will be asked to consider approval of oil and gas exploration on a 2,000-acre-tract - "ess than the size of Dulles Airport."

Without mentioning that the area involved in the controversy is such a tiny proportion of the total ANWR or that Congress 20 years ago left open the possibility of oil development in the area, environmentalists argue that the coastal plain is an essential breeding ground for a variety of wildlife, including one of the world's largest caribou herds.

An Alaska newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, recently reported that in oil development elsewhere on Alaska's north slope, "air emissions and water quality are within lawful ranges. Industry has displaced some species, and particularly calving caribou females, from their summer range. But wildlife populations are stable. The caribou herd in the oil fields is at its largest since biologists began tracking the population 23 years ago."

The Alaska newspaper pointed out that oil production's "footprint" on the environment has been reduced by so-called "directional drilling." This involves drilling laterally as well as horizontally, so that one rig on the surface can extract as much oil as four surface rigs pumping oil under the old vertical drilling system.

Environmentalists argue that the Alaska reserves would contribute very little to the nation's energy supply and that an equivalent contribution to addressing our nation's energy problem could be made through a modest increase in automobile fuel-economy standards.

These are arguments worthy of consideration, especially the emphasis on energy conservation through tougher automobile fuel-economy standards and other energy-saving measures, a subject that I felt Vice President Cheney skipped over too lightly in his energy address in Toronto. But surely the ANWR issue deserves to be considered unemotionally on the basis of all of the facts, including those cited above (facts which, incidentally, were available to anyone willing to do some research that goes beyond the rhetoric).

Emotionalism and irrationality, predictably, surface again when environmental activists react to the proposition that nuclear energy is a safe, efficient way to help address what Vice President Cheney said could become "an energy crisis" unless action is pursued on a variety of fronts.

I thought Cheney took a valid, realistic look at the nuclear-energy potential with these words:

"If we're serious about environmental protection, we must seriously question the wisdom of backing away from what is, as a matter of record, a safe, clean and very plentiful energy source."

To their credit, both Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., have made clear their view that nuclear-powered electricity generating plants should be among the avenues the United States pursues as it develops a comprehensive energy policy. After a recent tour of the Omaha Public Power District's nuclear plant at Fort Calhoun, Hagel said: "Energy is the most pressing challenge this country faces. We need the nuclear option to help meet demand. If we don't fix this, we'll experience a downturn in the economy such as we have not seen since the Depression."

"Nuclear power offers the cleanest form of energy," Hagel said, and nuclear power production has proved to be very safe.

Some would argue that nuclear power plants are not a feasible option until there is an assured safe method of storing radioactive nuclear waste. That concern is answered persuasively by author Richard Rhodes and nuclear engineer Denis Beller in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. Rhodes and Beller wrote:

"Nuclear waste disposal is a political problem in the United States because of widespread fear disproportionate to the reality of risk. But it is not an engineering problem, as advanced projects in France, Sweden and Japan demonstrate.

"The World Health Organization has estimated that indoor and outdoor air pollution cause some three million deaths per year. Substituting small, properly contained volumes of nuclear waste for vast, dispersed amounts of toxic waste from fossil fuels would produce so obvious an improvement in public health that it is astonishing that physicians have not already demanded such a conversion."

I see those environmental extremists in the back of the room are still on the ceiling. But I hope there are enough open-minded people out there in the general public and in the decision-making political world that the very serious issues of environment and energy can still be discussed and decided rationally, not hysterically.



LOAD-DATE: May 10, 2001