White House Is Confident Of Senate Approval for Alaskan Drilling

The White House is confident its plans to open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil and natural gas production will win approval in the Senate in September, an administration official said on Wednesday.

The area in question, a remote area in northeast Alaska called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), is ground zero for President George W. Bush's energy package to boost domestic production and wean Americans from some of their dependence on foreign oil imports.

"This administration is confident that it can move this package in its entirety," Karen Knutson, deputy director of Vice President Dick Cheney's national energy policy taskforce, said at a panel hosted by a conservative think-tank.

The House of Representatives earlier this month voted to open the refuge, but legislation to drill in ANWR will likely face an uphill battle in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

At a panel discussion on the issue hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, a Senate staffer was careful not to pronounce an easy victory for the bill.

"It's tough for us to prognosticate exactly what's going to happen in the Senate," said Dan Kish, a staffer on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The committee will likely move ANWR-inclusive legislation onto the Senate floor in September, he said.

Word choice lies at the center of the political battle over ANWR. Environmentalists and most Democratic lawmakers vigorously oppose drilling there and portray the area as the pristine center of the country's wilderness spirit.

Pro-drilling advocates see ANWR as a flat, treeless tundra devoid of life where temperatures routinely dip below zero and it is dark for months at a time.

ANWR "is the most God-forsaken place around," and would likely be chosen as the site to divert an Earth-bound asteroid, said Jonah Goldberg, an editor with the National Review.

Green groups have put environmental sentimentality ahead of economic sense, Goldberg said, and would oppose ANWR drilling "even if there were 100 billion trillion barrels of oil and you could get it out with a turkey baster," he said.

Knutson pointed out that despite current opposition in the Senate to drilling among most Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans, that chamber has in the past voted to open the refuge. But the measures never made it into law. The administration has pledged to drill ANWR in an "environmentally friendly way," Knutson said.

The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives on Aug. 2 passed an energy bill in a 240-to-189 vote that includes limited drilling in ANWR. That was after a separate amendment to block drilling in the refuge failed by a narrower margin - 223 to 206.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, declared any bill containing ANWR dead-on-arrival in the Senate, and Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts has vowed to filibuster such a bill.