"What this country needs is an energy strategy worthy of the enormous energy-related problems it faces: global warming, soaring energy costs and dependency on Middle East oil among them. Opening up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drill for oil and gas is not such a strategy. Yet that is the road the Bush administration is headed down once again.

In recent weeks, the administration has mounted a full-court press. Gale Norton, the interior secretary, and Samuel Bodman, the new energy secretary, recently toured the refuge with newer members of Congress, whose votes could be decisive.

In addition to the familiar economic arguments - that the refuge is America's last great untapped source of domestic oil and is crucial to its competitiveness - Ms. Norton emphasized one other line of thought, which she spelled out yesterday in an Op-Ed article in The Times. It is that drilling technology has advanced to the point where we are capable of extracting billions of barrels of oil without harming the refuge's fragile ecology or abundant wildlife.

Environmentalists beg to disagree. Where Ms. Norton sees undisturbed tundra, they see hundreds of miles of pipelines, roads and drilling platforms, which would fragment wildlife habitats and corrupt a wilderness that, according to recent polls, a majority of Americans wish to leave undisturbed. We have expressed such reservations ourselves. But what troubles us most about President Bush's fixation on drilling is what it says about the shallowness of his energy policy."

Get the Story:
Editorial: More Energy Follies (The New York Times 3/15)
pwnyt

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