we are not being heal hostage to the wishes of the middle east unless we choose to be. We should take Iraq and pump the oil to pay for the war and the occupation and keep oil prices down. ANWAR is a drop in the bucket.
Increasing efficiency standards is worth hundreds of ANWARs.
Consider the PMPGF. That's the Personal Miles Per Gallon Factor as described by Joe Soucheray, local talk show host here in Minneapolis/St. Paul.
http://www.garagelogic.com/ Joe's website here.
Take your Chevy Suburban that gets 22 mpg on the highway. Put in eight people. Drive one mile. Your PMPGF is 176 mpg.
Take your average "speck" that gets 34 mpg on the highway.
Put in four people, (if they're under 5'2" in the back seat). Your PMPGF is 136 mpg.
You've got a bunch of stuff to haul. You've got to go 25 miles. In the Suburban you make one trip and burn 1.136 gallons of fuel. In the "speck", (I used a Ford Escort for comparison, FYI the Dodge Neon gets the same hwy mpg), again, you've got to go 25 miles but it takes you three trips. You burn 2.205 gallons of fuel.
Bottom line is that the dems would rather put our troops at risk by having them stationed in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc. to protect our interests than to put some caribou at risk. Once again, the animals are more important than people.
Another reason the dems don't want ANWR drilled is because it would be a huge boost to our economy. It would put thousands of people to work. We'd keep more of our money at home. The dems want us all dependent on the federal government for everything.
Drilling ANWR would help destroy their master plan. The master plan that includes the government owning/controlling everything and we work our butts off to pay for the privilege of using it.