U.S. May Open Oil Reserve in Alaska to Development

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 � The Bush administration today proposed opening up part of the nation's largest remaining block of unprotected public land to oil and gas development.

The proposal affects nearly nine million acres of the Alaska North Slope in the government's National Petroleum Reserve.

Home to distinctive wildlife and tundra, the land is near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the administration still hopes to win the necessary Congressional approval to open up to oil drilling...

The bureau (of Land Management) acknowledged that some of the land is ecologically sensitive, noting, for example, that the Kasegaluk Lagoon offers "primitive recreation experience, is rich in wildlife, and features marine tidal flats," which are rare on the North Slope. It also is home to threatened species and provides subsistence living for local residents.

One proposal would open the entire 8.8 million acres to oil and gas leasing. A second would make 96 percent of the land available, preserving the Kasegaluk Lagoon and providing some other protective measures.

A third would make 47 percent of the land available, with additional protections. The fourth would do nothing.

Deirdre McDonnell, of Earthjustice Juneau in Alaska, said the government proposal was "about greed."

"No matter how much the oil companies get," Ms. McDonnell said, "they keep coming back for more. And the Bush administration is only too happy to oblige."

The Clinton administration obliged as well, opening some of the reserve to oil and gas exploration in 1998.

Melinda Pierce, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, said, "The Bush administration is busy scouring the American landscape for more places to punch holes and set up oil rigs, when instead we should be investing in renewable energy and working to permanently protect special places in the western Arctic."

The area was established in 1923 as "Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4" as an emergency oil supply for military purposes and administered by the Navy. Even during the 1973 oil embargo, it was reserved solely for national defense. But it has remained undeveloped mainly because it is so remote.

The 23 million acres of the full reserve may contain 6 billion to 13 billion barrels of oil, while the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 100 miles to the east, is believed to contain 3.2 billion to 11.5 billion barrels.

Chuck Clusen, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Alaska Project, said, "Any oil produced in the western Arctic would be only a drop in the bucket compared to the oil that can be saved with improved auto fuel efficiency."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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The Law and the River

By ANTONIO ROSSMANN

BERKELEY, Calif.

On New Year's Day, Californians woke up to a new reality as painful as any hangover. The secretary of the interior cut the delivery of Colorado River water to Southern California by nearly one-fourth of what urban areas there consume in a year.

The secretary, Gale A. Norton, said her action was forced by the Law of the River � that venerable collection of laws and agreements between the Interior Department and the districts that use Colorado River water. She says she had no other choice because the districts could not agree by a Dec. 31 deadline on how to cut back on the water they drew. She singled out for blame the Imperial County Irrigation District for refusing to let some of its agricultural water go to San Diego.

In reality, the deadline was a distraction. What's going unnoticed in the furor is the Interior Department's own failure to protect the environment and its indifference to the fate of endangered wildlife in the region. If Ms. Norton will not change course, her actions call for a New Law of the River.

The Dec. 31 deadline Ms. Norton invoked is not dictated by the Law of the River, as she claims. It was inherited from her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, and she was free not to impose it. In 2000 Mr. Babbitt established that deadline, expecting that the Imperial-to-San Diego transfer would prove environmentally acceptable. But he was wrong. Recent California State Water Board hearings revealed that the transfer would instead produce terrible consequences: every acre-foot of water transferred to San Diego would shrink the Salton Sea, an inland body of water into which Imperial's agricultural runoff drains. Before the construction of the Hoover Dam, floods from the Colorado naturally filled the sea; since then it has been sustained by Imperial Valley runoff.

At year-end, officials at Imperial could not agree to the transfer because it would have meant choosing one of two equally unacceptable alternatives: letting productive farmland lie fallow to sustain the sea or destroying one of the nation's largest avian habitats and creating a regional air-quality hazard from the particles that would be emitted if the shoreline of the Salton Sea receded.

Over the protests of Imperial County, Ms. Norton insisted that Mr. Babbitt's artificial deadline be met. She also seized part of Imperial's allocation of river water to punish the district for not agreeing to the transfer. When the district challenged that seizure in federal court, her department responded two days ago by threatening further cutbacks in water allocated to Imperial.

The Interior Department has taken California's water districts to task for broken deadlines and failed responsibilities, yet it is guilty of those very sins. It has failed by two years to meet a real deadline: the one Congress set for a Salton Sea restoration plan. The department is also charged by Congress to enforce the Endangered Species Act, but it has ignored the impact of its actions on those species inhabiting the Salton Sea.

Forty years ago, a handful of Supreme Court justices all but predicted that the Interior Department would fabricate the crisis now facing California. In its 1963 Arizona v. California decision, the court found that in authorizing the Hoover Dam, Congress had delegated to the secretary of the interior authority to apportion the river among Arizona, Nevada and California.

The majority gave the secretary virtually unlimited discretion to distribute surplus in times of plenty and to cut deliveries in times of drought. Three justices dissented, warning against "a single appointed federal official vested with absolute control, unrestrained by adequate standards, over the fate of a substantial segment of the life and economy of three states." Ms. Norton's punishment of California painfully vindicates the dissenters' apprehension.

The Supreme Court fashioned the old Law of the River to meet the needs of mid-20th century America. The justices now need to use federal mandates to refashion a contemporary law, one that respects community will and ecological stability along the Colorado as much as proprietary consumption.

Antonio Rossmann, who teaches land use and water law at the University of California at Berkeley, is special counsel to Imperial County.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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