NOTE:  Sam Graves is the U.S. Congressperson from Missouri's 6th District, which includes Kansas City, as well as Parkville, which lies just outside Kansas City.  The Luminary is Parkville's weekly newspaper.   

It is good to know that Congressman Sam Graves (motto: "never turn down, return, or contribute to charity $2,000 worth of campaign contributions from clients of Jack Abramoff") is hanging around Parkville, weighing in on issues of environmental concern (Parkville Luminary, January 20, 2006).

The League of Conservation Voters (www.lcv.org) is a non-partisan organization which publishes The National Environmental Scorecard. The Scorecard represents the consensus of experts from 19 respected environmental and conservation organizations who selected the key votes on which Members of Congress should be graded. LCV scores votes on the most important issues of the year. For the second session of the 108^th Congress, Congressman Graves received a Scorecard rating of 0 percent, which tied him with our esteemed Senators for voting record futility. You can bet that this trio was rated better by organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers, PHARMA, the American Chemistry Council, big oil, and the Friends of Jack Abramoff. I was just joking about that last one. Of course, Jack Abramoff HAS no friends (now). (As an aside, it is amusing to read Congressman Graves' admonition that "lobbying groups are part of the process", as in "hey, I can't help it if they want to give me money!").

So, when Congressman Graves gushes the oil corporation line about how lamentable it is that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) was derailed in a recent Congressional vote, we should really take it with a grain of brine, er, salt. We should also recall that public lands, like wildlife refuges, belong to We The People, not to the oil corporations (which only want them for purposes of generating revenues). Which is what drilling in ANWR is really all about, anyway.

The Luminary article states that there is debate about the amount of oil in ANWR. While there is some question about exactly how much oil lies beneath ANWR, there is really little debate. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates with a 95 percent confidence level that 5.7 billion barrels of oil can be commercially extracted from beneath ANWR. The mean estimate for technically recoverable oil is 7.7 billion barrels. For the year 2003, the US used about 7.3 billion barrels of oil. Of course, oil use is growing, not static. And ANWR oil will not be available for years, no matter when oil pals like our delegation in Washington sneak permission through in some sort of legislative shenanigans. So it is very likely that the technically recoverable oil lying under ANWR will represent less than the US uses in one year. By the way, the USGS has established a 5 percent confidence level that 16.0 billion barrels of oil can be technically recovered from the deposits under ANWR. Statistically speaking, there is virtually NO chance that ANWR holds a 50-year supply of oil (mentioned in the article), unless that referred to the supply used in the Parkville area.

It is true that the area to be developed for petroleum in ANWR is only a relatively small portion of the totality of the entire refuge. What goes unsaid by the petro-apologists is that what they want to develop is virtually ALL of the coastal plain of ANWR. This is critical calving ground for the caribou on which the Gwich'in people of Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada subsist, and have for millennia.

Our cultural legacy on this continent has some successes, but it all rests on a foundation of the extermination of those people indigenous to this continent who were here before Europeans arrived, and of the biological resources on which their lives were sustainably based. Disrupting the subsistence lifestyle of the Gwich'in people represents another chapter in this bloody story. We could take a serious look at how, as a nation, we use about 25 percent of the world's energy with about 4 percent of the population, and how we might come up with a plan to live more within the means a closed system like the planet places upon us. Or we could avoid that sort of sober evaluation and continue to build, block-by-block, on that same old foundation.