Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge now has a $1bn price tag on it
Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski believes this refuge could generate vast sums of money once it’s opened to oil leasing. That would be a tragedy
By Kim Heacox
Years ago, camping in Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge, I watched a herd of caribou — 100,000 bulls, cows and their three-week-old calves — braid over the tundra, moving to a rhythm as old as the wind.
“Not many places like this left today,” said my friend Jeff, sitting next to me above an ice-fringed river.
And so Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski believes this refuge — 80 miles east of Prudhoe Bay — could generate $1bn over 10 years once it’s opened to oil leasing. She and her Republican colleagues slipped this drilling provision into the Senate Republican tax bill.
Murkowski repeatedly says this development would cover just 2,000 acres, “about one ten-thousandth of ANWR”.
The acronym ANWR conveniently deletes the words “wildlife” and “refuge”, with no regard for the polar bears, Arctic fox, musk oxen and migratory ground-nesting birds that come there every summer, some species from as far away as Patagonia.
