Once The ANWAR Is Open For Oil Leases Offshore Drilling Will Follow

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Once the infrastructure is in place inland on the refuge offshore drilling will be a foregone conclusion. Increased drilling offshore will negatively impact the Inupiat community's substinence hunting of whales. That prospect should give pause to those who cite the Inupiat's approval of refuge drilling and should change their view of the safety and wisdom of existing offshore exploration and development if the Alaska government's plans under Murkowski are realized.

The Inupiat Eskimo people of the North Slope have a
centuries-old nutritional and cultural relationship
with the bowhead whale. Most view offshore
industrial activity—both observed effects and the
possibility of a major oil spill—as a threat to the
bowhead whale and, thereby, to their cultural
survival. Because noise from exploratory drilling and
marine seismic exploration have caused fall
migrating bowhead whales to change their
movements, subsistence hunters have been forced to
travel greater distances to find whales, increasing
their risk of exposure to adverse weather and the
likelihood that a whale’s tissues will have
deteriorated before the carcass can be landed.
http://www.nap.edu/books/0309087376/html

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Petroleum News- July 25, 2004
http://www.petroleumnews.com/pnads/323718845.shtml

Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski has decided to continue to pursue drilling a stratigraphic test well offshore the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“We’re still evaluating the project (and) …. looking for ways to move it forward,” Becky Hultberg, the governor’s press secretary, told Petroleum News July 20 when she was asked about the July 9 deadline set by the state for commitments from oil and gas companies to join an ANWR strat well drilling consortium. Hultberg said the project was important to the governor.

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Alaska to lease offshore ANWR- August 01, 2004
http://www.anwr.org/archives/alaska_to_lease_offshore_anwr.php

The state of Alaska said in late July that it will add tracts offshore the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oct. 27 Beaufort Sea areawide oil and gas lease sale. The 26 tracts had been deferred in previous areawide lease sales.

The proposed sale, tentatively scheduled for March 30, covers nearly 9.8 million acres off Alaska’s northern coast from the Canadian border to Point Barrow.

[NVMojo]

1. and drilling in all national parks in the west will commence and ...

someone told me that the ANWR was a payoff to British Petroleum for deals related to the Uzbekistan pipeline we had soldiers guarding (not sure if they are still there).

Anyone heard anything like that???

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2. and offshore in Florida, California . . .

There are conflicting reports about whether BP even is interested anymore in ANWAR. I suppose it depends on whether they can disprove the early assessments that show the benefits of ANWAR drilling to be outweighed by negative factors like short-lived supply, production difficulties, and publicity problems.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

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4. Two years ago similar language was put into a budget reconciliation bill

and the entire resolution failed. The House rejected the ANWAR proposal as too costly this time around. There is a very good chance that they will abandon the Senate language about ANWAR if we can gear up enough public outrage and opposition before they reconcile. At the very least, we can hold up the entire resolution and doom the effort.

Let's get busy!

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