Congressional Budget for Fiscal Year 2004 (Continued)

Ms. MURKOWSKI. I thank the Chair. Madam President, the discussion about ANWR is more than just pictures. It is more than statistics, numbers, and barrels of oil that might be recoverable. ANWR is about real people, real jobs, and real opportunities, and that is what we need to be focusing on. We do not need to get caught up in the hype of the pretty pictures. I will be the first to tell you that my State is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, and I want to keep it that way. I would not be supporting anything, and I would not be standing on the floor of the Senate suggesting that we should do anything to despoil that.

I want to talk briefly today about three points and what ANWR means to us in Alaska. It is jobs, it is protection of the environment, and it is also about economic security—three commonsense, basic issues.

Let me talk quickly about the environment because it is these attacks that I think first and foremost have kept ANWR from being developed for the past 20-some years, all the concern of the development of oil and gas reserves on the North Slope, on the Coastal Plain. It was intended and identified as early as 1960 by President Eisenhower that this area had great potential for oil exploration and drilling and should be utilized as such.

We do care for the environment. We have shown that through construction of our 800-mile Trans-Alaska pipeline that carries the oil safely, bisecting the State from top to bottom. We have done a darn good job, and the scientific studies and reports, including the National Academy of Sciences' report that came out 2 weeks ago, demonstrate that. We do a good job.
We care for our environment in Alaska.

The environment and development are not mutually exclusive terms. We have demonstrated time and again that they are not mutually exclusive. For those who will take the time to visit our oilfields up North, I think they will be amazed at the technology, the innovation we utilize when it comes to the extraction of our natural resources.

The good Senator from New Mexico stood in this Chamber earlier and talked about the directional drilling and the technique that is now available to develop our oil. I think he used the number 4 miles; that we can snake this oil well down across a 4-mile area of terrain. He used the analogy of a child with a straw and a milkshake and that straw could go 4 miles. That is a pretty vivid image. Actually, the good chairman of the Energy Committee is incorrect; we can actually go 6 miles. The technology has come so far in the 30 years since we have been drilling on the North Slope.

We talk about the footprint. The footprint has been described in so many ways. You can fit six of the oil development areas in the size of Dulles Airport. It is the size of the Pinehurst golf course. The visuals are there, but what we need to impress upon people, what we have to impress upon people is that the footprint is practically negligible in the context of the whole Coastal Plain and certainly in the context of the whole of ANWR and even more certainly in the context of the entire scope of our State.

What we are talking about, first of all, is very small. But even if it is small, we still need to do it responsibly, and we do that through the technology. The State of Alaska is the first to make sure the environmental standards are met and the permitting requirements are met. Nobody wants to rape, spoil, or ruin the land.

Madam President, I am third generation Alaskan. I am the first person serving in Congress for the State of Alaska who was actually born in the State. I was born in the territory. I am the last person to suggest we should do anything that would spoil our environment, my environment, the environment in which I choose to raise my family. My boys, my husband, and I live for fishing, hunting, camping, and backpacking. This is the part of Alaska we want to preserve. So let us do it right. We know how to do it right.

I will talk a bit about the jobs. We have talked about jobs repeatedly on this floor. Last night, we demonstrated through the testimony and the charts that we are talking about some 575,000 jobs across the country. We need to remember that when I talk about jobs, I do not want people to think that Alaska is interested in opening up ANWR just because it means jobs and opportunity for my constituents, for the people in my State. It does. It means that, and it means more. It means roads, hospitals, schools, and facilities. It enables people in my State to live, but it also means jobs across America.

As I said, this means 575,000 jobs across the country. If we look at the numbers, they are all over the board: The State of New Jersey, 178,000 jobs; the State of Pennsylvania, 27,000; the State of Ohio, 25,000; the State of Kentucky, 10,000; the State of Texas, 47,000; the State of California, 63,000 jobs. We are talking about real jobs for real Americans across the country.

We are considering the economic stimulus package that the President has put forth. There is no better economic stimulus than jobs and job opportunity. We can provide that for America through ANWR, and they are good-paying jobs.
I made the point last night—and it is compelling—that the job opportunities right now for Alaska are approximately 11,000 jobs within the petroleum industry. If we were to accept this amendment, if we were to strip ANWR from the budget resolution, what these other States would be saying is that it is OK for us to have petroleum-based jobs in our States but, Alaska, we do not want you to have any more. We are cutting you off. In other words, Massachusetts could keep its 20,000 petroleum-based jobs, New Jersey could keep its 27,000 petroleum industry jobs, and New York could keep its 37,000 petroleum industry jobs, while Alaskans should look for alternatives.

The impression I get as an Alaskan, looking from the inside out, is that the lower 48 would just as soon lock us up, not allow us to have good-paying jobs that will feed our families and allow us to live in the State we want to live.

But, no, the jobs we should have are jobs such as carrying the bags for the tourists who come to our State. Yes, we want tourism but we also want real jobs, and these petroleum-based jobs are jobs that are real for Alaskans.

It is one thing if the residents of the State of Alaska said we do not want this and Congress was trying to shove it down their throats, but Alaskans have said yes. We have said we will accept responsible oil development and production in our backyard. We will take it, and we will do it responsibly. We promise we will be responsible.

This gets to my last point, which is economic security and basically plain old common sense. There is kind of an 800-pound gorilla sitting in the Chamber now. We are literally at the brink of war. We do not know what is going to happen in Iraq. We do not know if Saddam Hussein is going to torch the oil fields. We have no idea. What we do know is that in the past several months, we have increased our imported oil from Iraq. We have doubled our imports from Iraq in the past couple of months. We have sent billions of dollars to Iraq. I am not quite sure how the paper trail goes, but I do not think it is too farfetched to assume that we send billions of dollars to Iraq to Saddam Hussein, who in turn sells us the oil that we place in our aircraft or our air carriers and we send our men and our women over to defend no-fly zones, to put them in harm's way, when we could be producing domestically. If that does not keep us awake at night, I do not know what will. It does not make sense at this point in time.

Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, it has been suggested in the past few minutes and last evening that instead of opening ANWR, we need to look to conservation; we need to discuss CAFE standards; we need to look to alternative fuels.
We need to keep ANWR in context. This is not an either/or debate. These concepts are not mutually exclusive. We have to have increased conservation efforts, of course. That is reasonable. But as the Senator from New Mexico has stated, we will never be entirely free in our reliance on oil, on petroleum products.

When you look at what we get from petroleum products, it is not just the gasoline that goes in our vehicles. That is not the only issue. We use it in our plastics. We use it for Band-Aids, for perfume, for so many things that you can't even imagine. We will continue to need gas. We will continue to need oil. These are necessary for us as a society.

To suggest that we are going to conserve our way out of reliance on petroleum is not reasonable. It is not feasible. We have to accept both. We need the domestic energy sources that only ANWR can provide to us. We have heard it repeated time and time again today and yesterday and in the years throughout the debate, this is where the energy reserves are. We can't deny that. We can't be put off or led astray by looking at nice pictures and thinking that somehow or other in order to preserve this area, we have to give up development.