Editor’s Note: Below is a condensed version of a letter from Congressman Don Young to Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) regarding a bill that would have delayed the February lease sale in the Chukchi Sea.
I am disappointed that you have chosen to introduce H.R. 5058, which seeks to postpone Lease Sale 193 in the Outer Continental Shelf in federal waters off Alaska. If, in combination with your decades-long opposition to ANWR, it succeeds in stopping U.S. production of energy, I am afraid that the people of Massachusetts will continue to suffer from an economy battered by higher energy prices and our increasing dependence on unreliable foreign sources for energy. At a time when all Americans are suffering from higher energy prices and the havoc those prices are having on the U.S. economy, I wanted to share with you the importance of Alaska’s resources to the people of the nation.
OCS Lease Sale 193 is estimated to contain 15 billion barrels of oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, for a combined total of 27.8 billion barrels of oil equivalent. ANWR is estimated to hold another 10.4 billion barrels of oil, for a total of 38.2 billion barrels of oil. This would almost double the total United States proven reserves of oil. And at today’s oil and gas prices, Lease Sale 193 and ANWR represent nearly $3 trillion to the U.S. economy, if we choose to develop them. Failure to access these energy supplies represents another $3 trillion that Americans will spend to buy foreign oil, because our economy will require at least that much oil until we switch to alternatives.
The choice for Americans is simple: do we want to send $3 trillion to foreigners, or get off our duffs and use our own energy and keep the money here at home? For the people of Massachusetts, the result of producing the energy that they own in Alaska is profound, especially at a time when many households in your state have been devastated by heating oil costs. I know that our former colleague Joe Kennedy has been working with Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela to provide 45 million gallons of heating oil to poor households in America. ANWR and Lease Sale 193 contains 36,000 times as much energy as Citgo, Hugo Chavez and our former colleague are providing for the poor and displaced in America. The production of that energy here would also produce hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, royalties and added benefits to help grow our own economy, instead of economies of foreign governments.
The people of Massachusetts used just under 137 million barrels of oil in 2005 to get around, heat their homes, generate electricity and make things. The energy in Alaska you oppose would fill all of the needs of the people of your state for 279 years, and create hundreds of thousands of American jobs and billions of dollars in royalties and taxes – instead of being replaced by foreign oil and foreign jobs. Surely you can understand – at a time like this when our economy is stumbling and our people are suffering from the high cost of energy – why I think it is important that we begin to work together to bring America’s energy supplies online to help Americans.
What I find most interesting is that your proposal to lock-up vast amounts of American energy coincides with the so-called “economic stimulus” proposals, all of which are nothing more than band-aid fixes that ignore the root of the problem. True economic stimulus, as our competitors around the globe have shown us, is having abundant, affordable, and reliable supplies of energy to inject into an ailing economy. That is why I have had a hard time understanding why you would introduce legislation that would deliberately withhold domestic supplies of American energy from those Americans to whom they belong so that we can continue to buy more foreign oil, send more American dollars to foreign governments, and pay even higher energy costs.
Some have ridiculed President Bush for asking the Middle Eastern countries to produce more oil on his recent trip, suggesting that he was “begging for oil.” I wonder why he didn’t just stay at home and ask Congress to stop making it illegal to produce energy in the United States, and forego begging foreigners for their oil.
– Congressman Don Young
