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updated November 18, 2003 Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign Action needed:
Upcoming Arctic Refuge slide presentations:
Special thanks to the Alaska Coalition and the Alaska Wilderness League for help in organizing the slide presentations * Call Chad Kister at (740) 707-4110 for more information about the presentations.
You can now order the book Arctic Quest or make a donation to the Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign online New Republican Congress disastrous for Arctic Refuge: Time to take action! Write call and fax your Senator and Representative today -- and every day! Schedule a slide show in your home town! Contact (740) 707-4110 or email chad@arcticrefuge.org if you can schedule an event. For event organizers, here are some resources: Click here for a sample color flier (download and open in Word 2000) Click here for a sample black and white flier (download and open in Word 2000) Click here for a sample press release News
"Evidently, we're supposed to exempt Alaska from all the requirements of ARCTIC WILDERNESS BILL REINTRODUCED - OVER 130 COSPONSORS! REPUBLICAN SENATORS VOW TO OPPOSE ARCTIC IN BUDGET BILL ARCTIC CHAMPIONS PREPARED TO REINTRODUCE ARCTIC BILL About the 108th Congress
This is it! The countdown has begun and the stage is set for the Senate to decide the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Drilling proponents are pulling out all the stops and spending millions to coerce your senators into supporting oil development in the Arctic. Their efforts are paying off, which is why we are asking for your help once again. Senators across the country need to hear one last time that Americans, like you, care about protecting this spectacular national treasure. They need to know that as a nation we are not willing to sacrifice our last remaining wild places in a misguided oil-drilling frenzy that will do nothing to address the nation's energy needs. This is one of the biggest conservation battles of the new century. It is a landmark case that could set the stage for many more wildlife victories. But we must win this one first! That's why we need your help more than ever. What You Can Do Additional Information
TAKE ACTION
NOW!!! We need our Senators to get SWAMPED with faxes, e-mails, and phone calls from their people telling them to kill the Lott / Murkowski / Brownback amendment and to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This takes only a few moments and can really make a huge difference! Here are some resources to use. . Click here to send a fax or email letter to your senators. Talking Points for Phone Calls This is easy and VERY effective.
2.
Tell them you’re calling about a vote on Monday
3.
Tell them to Please vote to protect the Arctic Refuge and to
kill the Lott / Murkowski / Brownback amendment to the Railroad
Retirement bill. You
can ask the aide to repeat it back to you to make sure they got the info
correctly. Or you can
just say thank you and hang up.
Very simple, takes about 45 seconds.
Why not do it right now? There’s
your phone and you have all the info you need!
The
refuge is depending on you!!! Pick
up the phone and go! E-mails and FaxesTo
send an e-mail or to print a letter to fax, visit the Alaska Wilderness
League at www.alaskawild.org/action.html.
When you get to this site, pick the option to send an e-mail to
your Senators asking them to support the Arctic Refuge.
You will be able to edit the letter however you wish.
Make sure that you add in a line asking them specifically to
vote to kill the Lott / Murkowski / Brownback amendment to the Railroad
Retirement Bill. You
can also add in any of the talking points below. After
you do this, either send it directly via email, or print it and fax it
(fax numbers provided below). Talking
Points for e-mails and faxes: Drilling the Arctic Refuge will not help
address America’s energy needs:
Drilling will risk our nation’s largest and wildest natural treasures:
Oil development in Alaska has caused enough environmental damage:
Alaska has no need to raid our protected federal land:
A May 2001 survey conducted by Greenberg-Quinlan and the Tarrance Group found that 62% of voters oppose drilling, and a poll commissioned by the Service Employees International Union found that 62% of labor union members opposed drilling as well. The most recent Gallup poll (11/27/01) showed that Americans oppose drilling in the Arctic Refuge 51-44 percent. Drilling the refuge would impact over a million, not 2,000 acres:
The following objects could be scattered across the Coastal Plain and remain under the 2,000 acre “limitation”: - 1,500 football fields - 5,160 Statue of Libertys - 1,340 Washington Monuments - 20 Mall of Americas - 52 airport runways, 17 times as many as at Dulles International We need real, clean jobs, for American workers, not fictitious ones:
"Trying
to sell drilling in the Arctic Refuge as an economic stimulus proposal
is probably the greatest attempt to sting the American people since
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,”
-Senator Joseph Lieberman 11/14/01
NRDC’s
MURKOWSKI WATCH The
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has recently put together a
collection of Senator Frank Murkowski’s public statements in support of
opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
The purpose of this report is to set the record straight and
present the facts as they are, not as Senator Murkowski wants them to be.
Below are several of the “Murkowski Myths”. How many jobs could Arctic Refuge oil development generate? Recently
Sen. Murkowski made statements on the Senate floor requesting that
drilling in the Arctic Refuge be part of the “economic stimulus
package” Congress is debating. (Note that he likes to refer to the
refuge by its acronym, ANWR, perhaps to avoid mentioning that the area is,
first and foremost, a wildlife refuge.) “I am going to finish with one point, and that is the stimulus. We are talking about a stimulus in this nation. What does a stimulus mean? It means different things to different people. To some it means jobs; to others it means tax relief. I defy any member of this body to tell me a stimulus that is more meaningful than authorizing the opening of ANWR because what it would do is it would provide hundreds of thousands of jobs. Not government jobs, private sector jobs in shipbuilding, in developing pipes and valves. It would start immediately.” (October 31) “I
will close by outlining the significance of the economic stimulus
associated with this single issue. The Department of Labor Massachusetts
Survey indicates jobs, direct, 250,000; the Wharton Econometrics Institute
at the University of Pennsylvania lists the total employment, indirect, at
735,000 jobs associated with the development of ANWR; jobs in 50 states,
80,000 in California, 48,000 in New York. …We are looking at 200,000
jobs at a minimum, direct.” (November 8) Fact: A recent analysis by labor economist Dean Baker estimated that drilling in the Arctic Refuge would generate a total of 46,300 jobs. That is less than the number of jobs our economy generated in an average week from 1997 through 2000. Sen. Murkowski and other drilling proponents often cite a 10-year-old American Petroleum Institute-commissioned study by the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates (WEFA), which is not affiliated with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The WEFA study has been thoroughly discredited by at least five independent analyses, including a recent one by the Congressional Research Service. (See NRDC’s report on how many jobs oil development in the Arctic Refuge would generate: http://www.nrdc.org/land/wilderness/artech/farcjobs.asp.) How
much oil is estimated to be in the Arctic Refuge coastal plain? In a speech on the Senate floor on November 8, Sen. Murkowski said that our nation “is at risk use increased dependence on oil. What can we do about it? What we can do about it is increase domestic production. We are not going to relieve our dependence totally, but we will reduce it substantially.” In a May 8 interview with Bob Edwards, the host of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” Sen. Murkowski said, “The estimate [of oil in the Arctic Refuge coastal plain] is anywhere from 5 billion barrels to 16 billion barrels. If it were 16 billion barrels, it would be the largest discovery in North America in the last 40 years.” In
a March 20 appearance on CNN’s “Inside Politics,” Sen. Murkowski
told Judy Woodruff, “If there is a mean of 10 to 16 billion barrels in
ANWR, which is the estimate, it would be the largest field found in the
world in 40 years.” FACT: Sen. Murkowski confuses the amount of oil that USGS estimates is technically recoverable with the amount it estimates is economically recoverable. USGS defines technically recoverable reserves as “the volume of petroleum representing that proportion of assessed in-place resources that may be recoverable using current recovery technology without regard to cost.” In other words, technically recoverable reserve estimates do not take into account the costs of oil exploration and production, which would make much of the oil too expensive to extract. USGS estimates the amount of technically recoverable oil in the refuge to range from a 5 percent chance there is 11.8 billion barrels of oil to a 95 percent chance there is 4.3 billion barrels, with a average (mean) estimate of 7.7 billion barrels. Despite what Sen. Murkowski stated in his letter to the Washington Post, USGS estimates that there is only a 1 percent chance there are 16 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the refuge. When USGS includes the costs of finding, developing, producing and transporting the oil to market, as well as a 12 percent profit margin, the agency’s estimate of the amount of recoverable oil from the Arctic Refuge is considerably less. It estimates that if the price of oil remains around $20 a barrel, there is a 5 percent chance there is nearly 7 billion barrels, a 95 percent chance there is less than 1 billion barrels, and a 50 percent chance (or mean estimate) there are 3.2 billion barrels of oil in the Arctic Refuge. (World oil prices have been below $20 a barrel for seven of the last 10 years, according to the Energy Information Administration.) We currently consume 7.1 billion barrels of oil a year; 3.2 billion barrels is less than what we consume in six months. (For more information go to: http://energy.usgs.gov/factsheets/ANWR/ANWR.html.) For the entire
report, please contact Chuck Clusen or Elliott Negin, 202-289-6868 at NRDC. AMERICANS WANT FUEL EFFICIENCY According
to a new bipartisan poll released by The Wilderness Society, a majority of
American voters (57 to 36 percent) reject the idea that allowing oil
drilling in the Arctic Refuge would increase national energy security, and
endorse increasing fuel efficiency as the single most effective action
which could be taken right now to reduce the country's dependence on oil
and increase national energy security. A
majority of Americans in all regions (54 to 38 percent) also reject the
notion that in light of declining economy and layoffs, we need to open the
Arctic Refuge for drilling in order to create 750,000 new jobs (the jobs
figure cited in a largely discredited 1990 report used widely by drilling
proponents). The
national poll was conducted by the Mellman Group (D) and Bellwether
Research (R). The margin of error is +/-3.1% in 95 out of 100 cases. For
more information, visit www.wilderness.org. ROBERT REDFORD ON THE HILL Actor
Robert Redford traveled to the U.S. Capitol Wednesday (11/14/01) to call
on the U.S. Senate to protect Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
from oil drilling. During a
press conference, Redford, who sits on the board of the Natural Resources
Defense Council, said more than two million Americans have written letters
and postcards urging lawmakers to prohibit drilling in the Arctic Refuge. "I
am hopeful that the debate, which has yet to come, can get beyond partisan
bickering and get put before the public in an open and honest way. I think
the decisions we make right now will say a lot about us as a
country." Redford said. "I'd like to remind the current
administration that it was in fact a Republican president (Dwight
Eisenhower) who set aside this territory for protection." Redford was joined at a press conference by Sarah James, a member of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, and Senators Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), Russ Feingold (R-Wis.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) NOTES FROM THE FIELD This past Wednesday in
Tennessee, Organizer Jeff Barrie and the Alaska Coalition of Tennessee
presented their “Wall of Faces” at a press conference in Nashville.
The wall is 32 feet long and 8 feet high.
It is built in the shape of Tennessee and has affixed to it over
1200 photos of people from all over the state wishing to preserve the
Arctic Refuge. Each person is
holding a sign with their name and address along with a sign asking
Senators Fred Thompson and Bill Frist to oppose drilling in the Arctic
Refuge. For over two months,
members of the Coalition had been touring around the state taking pictures
of people who oppose drilling. The
people in the photos come from all parts of Tennessee and include Seniors,
Veterans, Labor, students, farmers, and businesspeople.
To see the Tennessean’s coverage, go to: http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/01/11/10562075.shtml?Element_ID=10562075
Take Action to save the Arctic Refuge
Call and Write your Senators daily!
Get your Senators FAX and web sites here. Hold your representative accountable
U.S. Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
Send a letter to the editor of your local paper at: Express from the heart why your Representative, Senator and President George Bush should protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness. Include this web site so more citizens can see the land through pictures, take action online and join the network to be notified for demonstrations and action alerts. Call or write your representative: Don't know who your Representative is? Find out at Arctic Refuge Slide Show You can view a slide presentation about a 700 mile journey by foot and raft through the Arctic Refuge, a giant wilderness in imminent peril. Then take action to try to save it. This amazing land is threatened by U.S. President George Bush's call to destroy it for oil development. This is the last undeveloped section of Alaska's Arctic coast line, and a critical breeding ground for hundreds of thousands of caribou, more than a hundred species of birds, polar bear, musk ox, snowy owl, Arctic Char, Walrus, seal, Bowhead whale, snow geese, Arctic Tern, golden eagles and many more creatures. slide show for larger monitors - slide show for smaller monitors Schedule a slide show in your area: Arctic Quest Author Chad Kister will perform an enhanced version of the above slide show and get petition signatures, letters and contacts for the desperately needed campaign to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil development on the coastal plain. The Porcupine Caribou Herd migrates a thousand miles over the Brooks Mountain Range from a range the size of Texas. The herd masses together more than 200,000 strong to give birth to the next generation of caribou on the fertile coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The calving grounds are sacred to the native peoples. who understand they must be protected for the future of the caribou that provides clothing and food to the Gwich'in and Inupiaq peoples. But oil companies including British Petroleum, Exxon and ARCO are poised to develop this coastal plain. Development would devastate this last intact caribou herd and Arctic ecosystem left in North America. See the photos of this amazing place and look at the maps of development overlaid with caribou breeding areas, muskox ranges, polar bear dens, snow geese use and Arctic Char migrations. This is the last protected area of Alaska's 1,100 miles of Arctic coast, yet it is in imminent threat. Please write a letter to your Senator and to President George Bush and ask that they protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain as wilderness. Arctic Refuge Expert and Activist Chad Kister has a slide presentation that inspires people to act to send a letter or do more to save this largest wilderness area left in North America. Chad Kister has written a 340 page book about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the threat oil development poses to it. Kister backpacked and rafted more than 100 miles through the Arctic Refuge, living off the roots, berries, greens and fish that he gathered and caught. Kister has an inspiring 1-2 hour slide presentation (including time for questions and answers) that will show the imminent need to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the proposed oil development by oil companies. Kister can perform the slide presentation for $100 plus travel costs from Athens Ohio. Contact: email: chad@arcticrefuge.orgPhone: (740 753-2278 or (740) 707-4110 Address: Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign; P.O. Box 31; Athens, OH 45701 hits since March 7, 2003: |
