Norton & Hannity's Parade Of ANWR Lies - Media Matters

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Under the guise of putting "a few facts on the table," Fox News host Sean Hannity presented a series of misleading claims to advance the Bush administration's efforts to permit oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). There is ample evidence to refute each of these "facts," but no opponent of drilling appeared on the March 8 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes.

During an appearance by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, a leading supporter of ANWR drilling, Hannity suggested three such "facts": 1) that only "about 2,000 acres out of 19 million acres" of the refuge would be affected by drilling; 2) that since the caribou herd has "quadrupled" at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, despite oil drilling there, caribou at ANWR would be similarly unaffected by drilling; and 3) that the oil gained would be "the equivalent of everything we import from Saudi Arabia" over a 30-year period. Norton explicitly agreed with Hannity’s first two claims.

Regarding Hannity's first claim, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted on February 28 that while drilling supporters have pushed the 2,000-acre figure in an effort to minimize the potential environmental impact, "pponents counter that far more area would be affected by roads and pipelines connecting drilling pads." The Los Angeles Times reported on March 30, 2002, that "the Sierra Club says a 2,000-acre footprint could still support a broad level of development," and Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope noted that "one scenario that was consistent with the 2,000-acre footprint ... would sustain 53 drilling pads and 250 miles of roads and pipelines." These roads and pipelines would extend well outside the 2,000 acres that Hannity mentioned. Hannity's attempt to minimize the impact of drilling on caribou populations is also misleading. "he same predictions were made ... when we were going to drill in Prudhoe Bay, and I believe we quadrupled the herd size of the caribou," he said. But the 2002 Los Angeles Times report noted that while the Prudhoe Bay caribou's "numbers have been robust," the article cited a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report warning that, as the Times put it, "oil development would 'most likely' restrict the area available for caribou calving, leading to impaired reproduction and calf survival for the 123,000 caribou" in ANWR. The Times also noted that " further problem ... is the relative weakness of the Porcupine herd, which has been in a steady cyclical decline" and which "could reach the lowest levels ever recorded between 2005 to 2010 -- just when oil development would be getting under way." Similarly, the Anchorage Daily News reported on March 6 that "he plain, which runs across most of the North Slope, slims to a relatively narrow stretch in the so-called '1002 Area,' leading some biologists to worry that oil development would have a much greater impact there on caribou and other wildlife than in the Prudhoe Bay area or the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, both further west."

Scientific estimates of the likely oil production from ANWR contradict Hannity's claim that ANWR could provide as much oil as "we import from Saudi Arabia." Hannity based his assertion on the USGS estimate of 10.4 billion barrels of oil from ANWR, but that figure includes the "entire assessment area," or large portions of ANWR that lie outside the coastal plain and contain smaller amounts of oil. Because oil from these areas is too costly to be economically viable, the proposal currently before Congress would not permit drilling in these areas. Further, unless the amount of oil the U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia decreases dramatically in the coming years -- the U.S. Department of Energy projects that the share of U.S. oil consumption that will come from imports will increase from 58 percent to 70 percent by 2025 -- ANWR would not produce nearly as much oil as the United States is likely to import from Saudi Arabia. According to the Department of Energy, drilling in ANWR would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by between 3 and 6 percent, whereas the United States currently imports about 9 percent of its oil from Saudi Arabia, as Media Matters for America has previously noted."

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http://mediamatters.org/items/200503100005