The correct acronym is ANWR, which stands for "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge". Is there some alternate acronym that I am not aware of, or this this indicative of your level of knowledge in this area?

I agree with you that exploratory drilling is a logical step, although I feel that it will likely be disappointing.

However...

Last time I looked it was the wisdom of congress to ... decline additional oversight of Fannie & Freddie.... I'll put my faith in the market

So, Congress screwed up by allowing lending houses to run their businesses with little regulation, and yet you're advocating allocating petroleum reserves by way of little regulation?

The idea of allowing the market to decide what the best uses are for petroleum reserves only works if the true costs and benefits are accurately measured. The term negative externality comes to mind. Though I will not attribute this line of thinking to you, the fact that we have presidential candidates suggesting that we can achieve energy independence by drilling more on domestic lands, tells me that our policy makers are not accurately weighing the true costs and benefits.

And I am not sure about the specific costs of producing oil in ANWR vs tar sands from Canada, but in general, the price of oil is likely to rise, and thus in the future, there will be a time either when it will be worth it to drill in expensive places (assuming we have the capability to; find Gail the Actuary's write up on off shore drilling), or alternatives will be cheaper. However, there is a whole heck of a lot of underlying assumptions going into the phrase "or alternatives will be cheaper".

Drilling anywhere in the far north has it's own challenges. Add in the off shore factor & you're really looking at oil prices over 100 bucks a bucket to make any money. Does it make any sense to spend billions on infrastructure to pull out a few billion barrels of oil? There are huge debates over "proven" reserves in the far north...and a whole lot of dry holes have been drilled up there.

Drilling ANWR will cost billions. In the overall scheme of things, it will do little to nothing to alleviate American's energy crisis. If you want to chase pipe dreams, then spend your money on the Bakken formation. There is crude there, it's just hard to get to..but horizontal drilling in Bakken is going to be cheaper than drilling of the coast of Alaska

As for Pickens..Boone's a vet of the business. He built Mesa Petroleum..and yes, some of his points of view are because he's in nat gas. But so what? He's the ONLY person out there that's presented a reasonable plan to wean America off foreign oil. You've got 25 billion barrels in reserve right now, maybe another 50 if you take all the OCS reserves into consideration. Assuming you can drill & reach all of that.

If you want my opinion....if America is so paranoid about it's energy future, rather than spend billions drilling ANWR, it should spend billions on Oil sands extraction. Athabasca has nearly 2 TRILLION barrels of bitumen/heavy oil up there. We can get to 180 billion. If you can find ways to reach the rest of it, American can continue to be an energy pig long after we're all dead.

McCain..still has his head in his ass.

The arctic areas under consideration for drilling are in some of the most ecologically sensitive areas in the world. The low temperatures nearly guarantee that any mistakes, spills for example, would take eons for nature to correct. This is so because the microorganisms that would do the correction work do so in slow motion because of low environmental temperatures. Yes, even the simplest forms of life are regulated by the chemical-thermodynamic relationship of reaction rates vs temperature.

And yes the arctic regions are important breeding regions for much sea life. These reasons alone are sufficient to put off attempted exploitation of this area. Especially when even the EIA (who is well known for pie in the sky optimism) projects little impact on overall contribution to overall oil independence and lower fuel prices.

As a minimum, leave these areas alone now. Let future generations make the decisions regarding development of these regions. Future generations are more likely to understand the trade offs regarding development of these fragile regions. The present generation seems to be interested only in the immediate impact on their wasteful life style. It only cares about paying a few pennies less for fuel so they can keep their gas-guzzling, environmentally destructive vehicles in operation for a few more years.

"...Not developing the North Shore is simply foolish...."

Er -- no Puhkawn. Actually, it's a piece of long-term, far-seeing, global wisdom for which sombunall (Robert Anton Wilson's affable category) of USAmericans are not currently ready, because of the infantilising and extreme, delusional confusion that they suffer after decades of being propagandised by the hyper-rich gangsters-in-charge (gic) ruling 'elites' and their faithful stenographer-serfs in the commercial corporate media and commercialised, fanatically-indoctrinated academe.

The best thing to do with as much as possible of the sequestered fossil hydrocarbons still deep underground is to leave them there, and develop a different, ecologically-benign energy infrastructure, which includes a lot of conservation and voluntary demand reduction. As TODers know, we are beginning the involuntary kind right now, and for the foreseeable future.

However, promoting the ideas of 'leave it underground' and 'less is better' may not be such a loser with the ordinary US common citizens, once you take on, defeat, and depose from power your gics. No small task, I admit, but necessary if the US is going to survive at all in anything resembling its current form.

I follow your great and famous USAmerican Noam Chomsky a good deal. And one of the multitude of inisights that I've picked up from Noam is that the US commons are consistently well to the left of the 'elites' -- the gics and their steno-serfs -- in persistently-held opinions, if you find out what they really think, rather than what the media-serfs SAY they think, by the simple expedient of nerding steadily through the opinion-poll findings. Noam can stand to do that, and his discoveries are striking.

Given that small aforementioned precondition -- revolution in the US -- you shouldn't have too much difficulty aligning a lot of the citizens with these supposedly unsellable ideas: conservation; renewable, benign energy; a lot less energy; comprehensive defence of the absolutely vital, all-life-sustaining wilderness; and on.

You folks need that revolution. According to Naomi Wolf, the last stages of the ongoing fascistic coup-d'etat in the US, which began around the turn of this century, were set going at the beginning of this month. The choice now seems to be between what Naomi and friends are calling for: awakened common citizens rising up (as in the War of Independence against our English gics of that time), arresting these current US gic criminals who are destroying your republic and its constitution -- which has indeed been one of the great hopes of the world -- or just watching passively on TV as the coup is completed. Not exactly what your ancestors of two centuries back would have done, is it?

Without that precondition, USAmerica is going down. Further, harder, and for longer than the SU went down at the end of the 1980s.

I have a sister-in-law living in New England, and my partner and I are doing everything we can to get her out of the US, and back to her mum's house in Eire, or even just here to Britain, before the S which in now HTF in USAmerica actually buries it completely. You folks really need that revolution. And you absolutely don't need anything as utterly futile and destructive as more -- useless -- drilling, anywhere.

I suppose you also believe that 'the total footprint for drilling in ANWR would be the equivalent of a postage stamp on a football field'?