What's New
Congress mulls permanent protection for Arctic Refuge
On January 5, 2007, Reps. Ed Markey (Mass.) and Jim Ramstad (Minn.) introduced a bill to permanently designate the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a protected wilderness area. We're working to pass the bill in the 110th Congress.
Brief Summary
The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is truly one of America’s last wild places.
The Arctic Refuge is the calving ground of the 129,000-member Porcupine River caribou herd. For centuries, this vast herd has traveled hundreds of miles from Canada to the coastal plain to give birth to their young. The Arctic Refuge is the only conservation area in the United States where polar bears regularly den and is home to musk oxen, snow geese, Dall sheep and migratory bird species that visit all 50 states.
Oil drilling would destroy the Refuge. Prudhoe Bay, an area west of the Arctic Refuge where drilling is allowed, has more than 1,500 miles of roads and pipelines and thousands of acres of industrial facilities. In 2004, approximately 550 oil spills occurred on Alaska’s North Slope—about one spill every 16 hours.
Moreover, drilling in the Arctic Refuge will not solve our energy problems or make us less dependent on oil from the Middle East. Opening the Refuge to drilling would increase global oil reserves by less than one-third of 1 percent. Oil drilled from the reserves in the Wildlife Refuge wouldn’t be available for 10 years, doing nothing to stem our current high oil costs.
The Bush administration, powerful pro-drilling members of Congress and oil companies like Exxon-Mobil want to open up the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge for oil drilling. And they are willing to ruin one of America’s last wild places for less oil than the United States uses in a year.
