White House faces fresh criticism over oil projects
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Your support makes all the difference.The Bush administration may be stung by Congress's rejection of its plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, but it is pushing ahead with plans to open up other environmentally sensitive areas for energy exploration, including another chunk of Alaskan tundra and dozens of sites in the Rocky Mountains.
To the dismay of environmental campaigners, the White House hopes to see exploration for oil and gas by 2004 on 9.6 million pristine acres of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, an area 100 miles west of the Wildlife Refuge that is home to millions of migratory birds and about half a million caribou.
Further congressional approval might not be needed, unlike in the case of the Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR as it is known. Certainly, the area has not attracted anything near the political heat associated with ANWR, which has been a battle cry for Mr Bush's critics since the 2000 presidential election campaign.
Local environmentalists are nevertheless appalled. "A vast wildlands in Alaska's western Arctic stands to be defaced and irrevocably transfigured," a recent report by the Northern Alaska Environmental Centre concluded.
The proposed new drilling area was first opened up for preliminary exploration under the Clinton administration in 1999. Feasibility tests suggest the amount of oil is far less even than in ANWR, which Bush critics have repeatedly decried as insufficient to be either cost-effective or worth the environmental upheaval.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration's Bureau of Land Management is opening up record stretches of public lands to energy companies – four million new acres last year, up from 2.6 million acres in 2000, according to official figures.
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