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McCain, TR and ANWR

By Jeffrey Schmidt

In a recent interview with Bill O’Reilly on The Factor, John McCain made it clear, again, that he opposes oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Just like his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, Senator McCain is a “conservationist.”

With crude oil prices hovering around the $125 per barrel mark (at this writing) and threatening to go higher; with gallon gas prices at four dollars in some locales and—yes—threatening to rise; and with the cost of everything else that the country produces and consumes impacted by higher energy prices, it seems that Senator McCain’s devotion to TR is out of touch. Out of touch with today’s realities and TR.

It’s true that Roosevelt was a conservationist. He gave us the Grand Canyon National Park, after all. He was also a “trustbuster,” to use the term of the day. The Arizona senator, no doubt, gets some of his visceral dislike for Wall Street and big business execs from TR’s monopoly-smashing efforts.

But old Teddy Roosevelt was also something else. He was a nationalist, which, by contemporary liberal standards, made TR, well, at least uncouth and more like a barbarian.

Roosevelt’s nationalism wasn’t just about building a powerful blue-water navy or going eyeball-to-eyeball with the Brits or the Germans or the Japanese, but building the nation’s industrial might. Expanding the nation’s economy. Putting laborers to work. Making Main Streets thrive. And, to use a GOP slogan from later years, he was about “putting a chicken in every pot.”

In TR’s day, the United States was virtually energy independent. There wasn’t as many of us. Coal was king, and there was—and is—plenty of it. Roosevelt saw all those sooty, smoke-belching smokestacks not as an air quality problem but as a sign of health. The more smokestacks, the more robust the nation.

By all accounts, TR had a brawny mind. He was a strategic thinker. Coming on the scene today, he would easily grasp that America’s dependence on foreign oil threatens the nation’s security. His famous temper would flare when he saw how a coalition of fey liberals, anti-capitalists, environmental radicals, special interest lawyers and opportunistic politicians were stopping the nation from taking the steps necessary to wrest control of its destiny from the hands of Middle Easterner oligarchs and Banana Republic dictators.

A thinking man of action, TR would call for drilling off shore, making more use of coal, building nuclear reactors and developing oil and gas reserves wherever the Stars and Stripes waved. He’d fight to pour dollars into advancing the technology to exploit the oil shale that abounds in the western United States and Canada. Sure, he’d favor energy efficiencies. But he wouldn’t tell Americans to live with rolling brownouts. Or to cram a family of four into an overpriced Prius. He wouldn’t shrink family budgets through higher energy taxes. And he wouldn’t just shrug and tell Americans to “live with it,” like some Europeanized liberals do.

TR would drill in ANWR. Geologists would tell him that under the Arctic Coastal Plain lies, perhaps, 7.7 billion barrels of oil (expected mean estimate). A “Super Field,” in the vernacular. By comparison, Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, Lisburne, Endicott, Milne Point, and Kuparuk oil fields are currently producing about one and a half million barrels of oil daily. That’s nearly a quarter of the nation’s domestic production.

While ANWR offers no energy panacea, it would make a significant contribution to freeing the nation from the grip of the House or Saud and Hugo Chavez. Roosevelt, ever tenacious, would slice through all the cant and propaganda to get to more hard facts about ANWR.

He’d quickly learn that much of ANWR is no Arctic Eden. It is acre after unending acre of tundra, especially further north. 19.6 million acres, in all. That’s roughly West Virginia and Connecticut combined. North of the Arctic Circle, the barren world is shrouded most of the year in twilight or darkness. In the short summertime, herds of caribou do migrate there. But they just as sensibly migrate out when the nights grow long and the weather becomes harsh. There are some tribal people within ANWR’s confines, the Kaktovik Inupiat, who control 92,000 acres.

He’d further learn that Congressional mandate allows only two thousand acres to be developed for oil and gas, and that’s up in the aforementioned Arctic Coastal Plain near the Beaufort Sea. That’s less than half of one percent of the refuge’s total acreage. And he’d learn that the Inupiat, who control the mineral rights on their land, favor exploration and development.

But he’d find that Congress is prohibiting drilling within the one and half million acres set aside for exploration in the Arctic Coastal Plain, so geologists have no way to definitively know just how great ANWR’s potential is to the nation.

Glad to protect the environment, he’d discover that oil development technology has greatly advanced in just the last thirty years. The days of Texas oil wells dotting the landscape and spouting large plumes of black crude are long gone. Today, only small “footprints” are made on the land. Techniques and technologies like extended-reach drilling, well spacing, drilling mud disposal and ice roads and ice pads have dramatically lessened environmental impact.

TR, ever a winner, would see these techniques and technologies as a win-win.

But he would probably scratch his head wondering why John McCain, a national security stalwart, is failing to see the advantages of opening up ANWR to sensible development. He would wonder all the more why the Senator is failing to articulate even bolder, more comprehensive measures to meet the nation’s ever-growing energy needs.

Knowing TR, he’d take the bull by the horns and call the Senator into a meeting, man-to-man. He would ask the Senator point blank if he truly appreciated the peril the nation faces in the coming years if it doesn’t begin now to reclaim its energy independence. Will the Russians or Chinese not exploit a weakened and vulnerable America, he might ask?

And if plain talk and hard questions failed to bring the Arizonian around, TR wouldn’t pussyfoot; he’d tell his admirer to climb out of the arena and make room for a real leader.

Teddy Roosevelt was never shy to lead.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schmidt is a public affairs consultant. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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