In a high-profile speech on the environment Monday, John McCain still foolishly defended the congressional ban on energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As wrongheaded as McCain is on ANWR, however, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are even more misguided. Both favor a new windfall profits tax on oil companies that would do horrendous damage to America’s energy present and future.
ANWR’s coastal plain, about the size of Delaware, is estimated to contain more than 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil, enough to replace more than 20 years of imports from Saudi Arabia. New technology means that the area needed for actual drilling would be only about 2,000 acres, or roughly the size of a municipal airport. McCain last week insisted to talk show host Bill O’Reilly that the ANWR coastal plain is too “pristine” to consider drilling, but he couldn’t cite many facts. The area is boggy and treeless — and the vaunted caribou, about which environmentalists claim to worry so much, rarely use the area where drilling would be done. By the way, the caribou population in nearby Prudhoe Bay has gone from a mere 3,000 animals to more than 32,000 since drilling began there years ago.
McCain’s position on ANWR contradicts his own standards for governing energy exploration. In defending the ban against drilling off California’s coast, he cites “federalism” concerns, meaning that he thinks the people of California should make decisions about their own coastline.
But on ANWR, he resolutely ignores the 75 percent of Alaskans who consistently support drilling there. As the United States faces $4-per-gallon gasoline, McCain’s concern for stray caribou is an extremely harmful conceit.
McCain’s Democratic opponents propose to make things much worse at the gas pump. Obama wants a new energy profits tax to raise $15 billion a year, while Clinton would collect a total of $5 billion annually in new petroleum levies. Both candidates ignore history’s lessons. In the eight years after Jimmy Carter pushed through a windfall profits tax in 1980, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reports that it raised only one-eighth of the revenue its advocates predicted — $40 billion rather than the claimed $320 billion.
But Carter’s energy tax depressed domestic oil production by as much as 8 percent, while increasing U.S. oil imports up to 13 percent. Let’s see if we have this right: Greater dependence on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will bring down gas prices? Even a caribou knows better than that.
