Selling ANWR

Dana Milbank reports that Interior Secretary Gale Norton, a strong advocate of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, gave a speech touting the benefits of ANWR drilling recently:

"ANWR would supply every drop of petroleum for Florida for 29 years," she told a friendly audience at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, "New York for 34 years, Illinois for 43 years, California for 16 years or New Hampshire for 315 years."

That's great, but the obvious question would be, what about the overall effect of drilling in the Wildlife Refuge on the nation? Here, Gale's answer was slightly lacking:

"When you look at it for the whole country, you really get somewhat of a deceiving picture," the secretary answered. She said that's "not the way this operates," and said the question "assumes that unless a source of energy is going to meet all of America's needs then it's not worth looking at."

Clearly ANWR does not operate by meeting the needs of the nation. It does, however, operate by giving it's full oil capacity to each individual state. In other words, according to Gale, you have to take the capacity that drilling in the Wildlife Refuge would bring and multiply it by fifty, so that Illinois gets it 43 years and New Hampshire its 315. It's the only logical way to look at it, right?

And the actual answer to the above question? The administration estimates about 15 months.

But the administrations attempted snow job didn't end there:

In the afternoon, it was Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's turn. At a news conference at the National Press Club, Chao told the cameras that, according to "congressional estimates," the ANWR project could create a million jobs.

Actual job projection? 86,000 to 245,000. So Elaine's clearly rounding to the nearest million.

Makes you wish someone else had a plan for energy independence, doesn't it?