The strategy must be multi-faceted. I’ll list these actions separately before I discuss each one at length. This will obviously take more than one column.

1. Immediate opening, leasing and drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife refuge (ANWR).

2. Immediate plans to develop more nuclear-power stations. As in No. 1 above, all environmental groups’ stall tactics and misinformation campaigns should be ignored.

3. Ethanol production should be heavily subsidized, which has already been proposed in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

4. Expanded use of our natural coal resources. We have enough for more than 400 years.

5. Tax incentives for purchasers of ethanol-driven Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFVs) as well as tax credits to encourage the manufacture of such vehicles. A total of 600,000 of these vehicles are planned to be produced in 2006 by General Motors, even though they will continue to be powered by gasoline because of the lack of availability of fuel-refilling stations. There are currently only 600 such ethanol stations in the United States.

6. Lastly, for now, tax credits for the manufacture of cars with meaningful and measurable increases in miles-per-gallon statistics. This is the one that can be accomplished almost immediately.

Let’s start with No. 1, a drilling strategy for ANWR. The area consists of 19 million acres, of which 1.5 million would be explored, leaving the remaining 17.5 million acres untouched. Of this 1.5 million-acre area, only 2,000 acres would be involved in the actual drilling.

This represents a parcel no bigger than Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C. Give me a break. I’m tired of hearing about this huge, unspoiled, pristine area being ruined forever when 99.99 percent of the area remains untouched!

Why bother with all this effort? The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that ANWR could provide yields of up to 16 billion barrels of oil. There are oil-stained sands as well as oil literally bubbling up from the ground! This is roughly equal to all Saudi oil imports for more than 30 years.

Saudi Arabia is our third-largest oil supplier behind Canada and Mexico. As a matter of fact, ANWR would replace 100 percent of all the oil provided by the Persian Gulf countries for 20 years. Those countries include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This is making me feel safer already. It gives us more than enough time to fully develop strategies 2 through 6.

The environmentalists have been lying to us long enough. In 1968, they said there wasn’t enough oil to make it worthwhile to develop the Prudhoe Bay area. It took from 1968 to 1977 to create the Alaskan pipeline. Since that time, the area has provided more than 13 billion barrels of oil and is still producing, albeit at only 50 percent of its capacity. The pipeline is more than 800 miles long and the untapped area of ANWR, where the drilling would take place, is only 60 miles east of Prudhoe Bay.

Did I describe this "pristine" environment? According to Jonah Goldberg, editor of The National Review, the area is flat and treeless. Winters on the coastal plain last for nine months. There is complete darkness for 58 straight days, and temperatures can drop to 70 degrees below zero without factoring in wind chill. Summer creates huge puddles and attracts thousands of mosquitoes. No wonder many congressmen who voted against drilling never bothered to go and actually inspect the area.

Opponents of drilling also distort the facts by saying drilling would drastically affect the population of the porcupine caribou. Not that I care, but these same groups said the same thing about the caribou if the Prudhoe Bay were to be developed. From 1977, when the development began, to 2002, the caribou population increased from 5,000 to 32,000. Also, the polar bear population continues to grow and remain unthreatened.

The Wharton Econometrics Center estimates that, in full production, up to 735,000 decent-paying jobs would be created. Remember, in my first column I said if it were a choice between the spotted owl and jobs for people in the lumber industry providing for their families, the choice would be simple. Replace the words spotted owl with caribou and lumber-industry jobs with oil-production jobs. I hear caribou meat is quite tender and tasty. Fire up the grills!

I’ll get to steps two through six in future columns.

———

Tom Sears is a professor of accounting at Hartwick College in Oneonta and serves on the Unatego Central School Board of Education. He can be reached at SearsT@hartwick.edu. His column appears every other week.