What does 187,000 square miles “look like”? Well, it’s almost as big as the area covered by Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina — combined. Or it’s about the size of California, with South Carolina thrown in for good measure.
In short, it’s a vast area.
Why is that important? Because the Obama administration has declared that 187,000 square miles of Alaska and the waters and sea ice off Alaska’s northern coast must be protected as so-called “critical habitat” for polar bears. That will make it far more difficult for our nation to retrieve the vast amounts of natural gas and oil under all that land and water.
That makes no sense. Polar bear numbers have boomed in the past 50 years. They are not threatened by the oil and gas exploration that has been going on safely for decades in Alaska.
It also makes no sense from an economic and energy-independence standpoint. The United States needs to be reducing, not increasing, its dependence on oil from unstable or radical nations in the Middle East. We cannot reduce that dependence while shutting off access to domestic oil and natural gas that we have at the ready in places such as Alaska.
To make things worse, Obama also now says he will continue a ban on drilling off our Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida. He earlier planned to loosen the ban, but the BP oil spill changed his mind. The spill, though serious, was very much the exception to the generally safe drilling in the Gulf. It is no reason for such a harsh ban.
Does the administration believe gasoline prices are not high enough? Making it hard to seek new domestic energy will artificially inflate the cost of energy even further, making us still more dependent on the “tender mercies” of radical, oil-producing regimes around the world.
Neither supposed polar bear protection nor the BP spill justifies increasing that dependence.