A workmate never doubted this would pass and put his house on the market a couple of months ago when he was hired to work on the project.
“This is no way to treat the crown jewel of our National Wildlife Refuge System,” Feingold told colleagues.
The language in the budget bill assumes $2.4 billion in federal revenues from leasing in the refuge, which could contain some 10.4 billion barrels of oil.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said the nation’s growing thirst for oil – and need to curb its dependence on foreign sources – are ample reasons for opening the refuge.
“The oil in the ANWR is critical to our economic and national security,” Frist said, who added that drilling in the refuge will create “hundreds of thousands of jobs” and that new technologies would safeguard the fragile Arctic environment from the impacts of oil development.
“Some critics complain that drilling in ANWR will hurt the environment,” Frist said. “This simply isn’t true.”
Drilling supporters note the provision only opens 2,000 acres of the refuge’s 1.5-million acre coastal plain – an area Frist said is “the equivalent to a postage stamp on a tennis court.”
[…]
“We cannot drill our way out of this problem,” Durbin added, noting that the U.S. has less than three percent of the world’s remaining oil reserves but consumes more than 25 percent of the current supply.
Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski said the nation “should not say, if we conserve a little bit more, we do not need to open ANWR.”
“We need to face, as a nation, that we have a reliance on petroleum,” she told colleagues.
By a vote of 83-14, the Senate added a provision to the budget bill that blocks the export of oil from ANWR.
Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, cosponsor of the measure, said it “at least puts a band-aid on a flawed policy.”
Without the language, he said, “there is no assurance that one drop of Alaskan oil will get to America.”
Americans use a lot of cooking fat, too.
The Nelsons begin a project that makes a whole lot more sense.
Yeah, biodiesel is something that I’m hoping will become more prominent in the years to come. In addition to Nelson, there is an Afrobeat group based in California called Aphrodesia whose tour bus runs on only biodiesel, and I believe that Neil Young used a biodiesel/diesel blend awhile back for one of his tours.