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Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign Sign a Petition to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (July 3, 2008) Stevens Indictment Indicative of Big Oil's Undue Influence (July 30, 2008) Bush Spews Lies to Destroy Arctic Refuge (July 14, 2008) Video of Chicago Polar Bear Survival Tour presentation (813 megabytes, requires high-speed connection) You Tube Chicago Polar bear Survival Tour: Part 1, Part2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 (coming soon) Bush calls
for drilling where tens of thousands of caribou now gather The Arctic, and all life on our planet, is under siege by the human-caused climate crisis. The burning of fossil fuels, destruction of old growth forests and industrial agriculture are massively changing the chemistry of our atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect that threatens 60 percent of Earth's species with extinction. The Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign is an effort to spread the word about this crisis, and the need to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain as wilderness. Take
Action online to support the Safe Climate Act
upcoming speaking events: March 31: Washington DC April 19: Allegheny April 20: May 17: Chicago November 18: Ann Arbor, Michigan Recent speaking events: October 19: October 25: November 2: November 3: November 5: November 6: November 7: November 8: November 13: Sault November 14: November 15: November 16: 7 p.m. January 9: January 31: February 4: February 6: February 6: evening, February 10: February 11-13 February 14: February 15: February 21: University of Cinicinnati February 25: 8 a.m.-11a.m. Vinton Middle School: three presentations March 5: March 6-8: Public Interest Environmental Law
Conference; March 10: March 13: March 14: March 15: Midpines, California March 22-23: Jasper, Alberta, Canada ***Contact Arctic Quest and Arctic Melting author Chad Kister at chadkister@gmail.com or 740-707-4110 to schedule a stop in your home town or campus Slide Presentation organizing tools Sample Press Release for polar bear survival tour See the first five minutes of Caribou People See the first part of a portion of Kister's Berkeley Arctic Melting
presentation, showing the horrors of climate change in the Part two of Kister's Berkeley Arctic Melting Presentation Part three of Kister's Berkeley Arctic Melting Presentation Against All Odds: The Struggle to Save The Ridges offers inspiration to the environmental movement. Order Against All Odds (All proceeds are donated to the Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign) USFWS proposal to list polar bear as threatened should prompt coastal plain protection as wilderness (January 2, 2007) Columbus' legacy reminds of of need to protect Arctic Refuge for survival of Gwich'in and Inupiat peoples (October 10, 2006) Polar Bears increasing den on land, making the Arctic Refuge even more important to protect (October 3, 2006) Author, Film Maker offers solutions to gas prices, climate change with conservation solar and wind. Drilling the Arctic Refuge is NOT a solution and would have at most a one cent difference in gas prices in 20 years and will likely have no impact at all because they can only put so much oil through the Trans Alaskan Pipeline, and they already have 95 percent of the North Slope of Alaska, and plenty of oil within that area to keep the pipe pumping. Increasing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy to 39 miles per gallon would save more than 100 times more oil than could ever come from the refuge. Those saving could be seen within a few years, and would save every American money at the pumps. For event organizers: Here is a word document with promotional material for both of the presentations that Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign coordinator, author and film-maker Chad Kister can give on this tour, Arctic Quest and Arctic Melting (about his books of the same name) New film Caribou People just released. Producer to do film and speaking tour this fall to protect the Arctic Refuge: schedule a stop in your hometown! You can now get a copy of Caribou People for only $5.50 (plus $1.50 shipping and handling) Letter to the editor October 8, 2005 Petition to Ohio Senator George Voinovich (download and open in Word) Press Release June 22, 2005 Letter to the editor May 24, 2005 Dayton City Paper Cover Article on Arctic Refuge Letter to the editor about real impact of drilling Arctic Drilling in Budget Bill! Bush lies Arctic Quest Author sets facts straight on how drilling the Arctic Refuge is not a solution to our energy needs Action needed: Call (740) 707-4110 if you can host a slide or powerpoint presentation in your home town. Arctic Quest Author Chad Kister is free until July 15 and is planning a train tour in September. Please consider organizing an event or finding a group or coalition of groups to host a presentation. Please consider donating to help the
Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign to continue touring the Slide Presentation organizing tools
Schedule a slide show in your home town! Contact (740)
707-4110 if you can schedule an event. Slide Presentation organizing tools Thanks to: Alaska
Coalition and Alaska
Wilderness League Arctic National Wildlife Defense Campaign media coverage
Arctic Quest Author
to tour January through February press release New Republican
Congress disastrous for Arctic Refuge: Time to take
action! Write call
and fax your Senator and Representative today -- and every day! Schedule
a slide show in your home town! Contact (740) 707-4110 if you can schedule an event. For event organizers,
here are some resources: ·
Organizing the Arctic Quest slide
presentation ·
Checklist for organizing the presentation ·
Click here for a sample color flier
(download and open in Word 2000) ·
Click here for a sample black and white flier
(download and open in Word 2000) · Click here for a sample press release
About the Vote
in the Senate ARCTIC WILDERNESS BILL REINTRODUCED - OVER 130 COSPONSORS! REPUBLICAN
SENATORS VOW TO OPPOSE ARCTIC CHAMPIONS PREPARED TO REINTRODUCE ARCTIC BILL About the 108th
Congress What You Can Do Additional Information TAKE ACTION NOW!!! We need our Senators to
get SWAMPED with faxes, e-mails, and phone calls from their people
telling them to kill the Lott / Murkowski / Brownback amendment and to protect
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
This takes only a few moments and can really make a huge
difference! Here are some resources to
use. . Click
here to send a fax or email letter to your senators. Talking Points for Phone
Calls This is easy and VERY
effective. 2. Tell them you’re calling about a vote on
Monday 3. Tell them to Please vote to protect the
Arctic Refuge and to kill the Lott / Murkowski / Brownback amendment to the
Railroad Retirement bill. You can ask the
aide to repeat it back to you to make sure they got the info correctly. Or you can just say thank you and hang
up. Very simple, takes about 45
seconds. Why not do it right now? There’s your phone and you have all the
info you need! The refuge is
depending on you!!! Pick up the phone
and go! E-mails and Faxes
To send
an e-mail or to print a letter to fax, visit the Alaska Wilderness League at www.alaskawild.org/action.html. When you get to this site, pick the option
to send an e-mail to your Senators asking them to support the Arctic
Refuge. You will be able to edit the
letter however you wish. Make sure
that you add in a line asking them specifically to vote to kill the Lott /
Murkowski / Brownback amendment to the Railroad Retirement Bill. You can also add in any of the talking
points below. After you
do this, either send it directly via email, or print it and fax it (fax
numbers provided below). Talking Points for e-mails and faxes: Drilling
the Arctic Refuge will not help address ·
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, it would take at least a
decade to tap any oil from the refuge and even then, the mean estimate of
economically recoverable oil amounts to just 3.2 billion barrels or less than
what the ·
By increasing the fuel efficiency of our cars and trucks by just 3 miles
per gallon, we can save more than 1 million barrels of oil a day or five
times the amount of oil the refuge might produce. This would do far more to clean the air,
reduce prices for consumers, and make us less dependent on imported oil. ·
95% of Drilling will risk our nation’s largest and wildest natural treasures: ·
The Arctic Refuge is home to a greater abundance and more diverse
wildlife than any protected area in the circumpolar north. The Reagan Administration called the 1.5
million-acre Coastal Plain – where oil drilling is proposed – the “biological
heart” of the refuge. Home to
thousands of calving caribou, denning polar bears, roaming grizzlies, rare
musk oxen, and millions of migratory birds, the Coastal Plain is also
considered “ ·
From ·
The Gwich’in Athabaskan people of northeast Oil
development in ·
Prudhoe Bay and 13 other producing oil fields in the Alaskan Arctic
span nearly 1,000 square miles – a “footprint” larger than ·
Drilling the Arctic Refuge will destroy its untouched wilderness,
drain its scare supplies of fresh water, displace and lead to declines in
wildlife populations, pollute the air, and threaten the cultures of native
peoples. ·
·
By a wide margin, the American people oppose drilling in the Arctic
Refuge A May 2001 survey
conducted by
Greenberg-Quinlan and
the Tarrance Group found that 62% of voters oppose drilling, and a poll
commissioned by the Service Employees International Union found that 62% of
labor union members opposed drilling as well.
The most recent Drilling the refuge would impact over a million, not 2,000 acres: ·
The House bill opens the entire
1.5 million acre coastal plain “1002 area” of the Arctic Refuge to oil and
gas leasing and exploration. An amendment, adopted by the House, that
allegedly limited to scope of oil development to 2,000-acres actually does
nothing of the sort. Exempted from the acreage total are seismic and
exploratory drilling activities, the construction of ice or permanent roads,
gravel mines, and pipelines. To put this
in perspective, there are over 1,000 miles of pipelines are ·
The “limitation” also does not
require that the 2,000 acres of production and support facilities be in one
contiguous area. Thus, as with the
oil fields to the west of the Arctic Refuge, development could and would be
spread out over hundreds of square miles. The following objects could be scattered across the Coastal Plain and
remain under the 2,000 acre “limitation”: -
1,500 football fields
-
5,160 Statue of Libertys -
1,340 Washington
Monuments -
20 Mall of -
52 airport runways,
17 times as many as at Dulles International We need real, clean jobs, for American workers, not fictitious ones: ·
Some cite a 1990 American Petroleum Institute (API) funded study that
claims drilling the Arctic Refuge will create over 700,000 new jobs. In fact, studies by the respected
independent labor economists, like Dean Baker of the ·
We can create many times more jobs by building a new "Trying to sell drilling in the Arctic Refuge as an
economic stimulus proposal is probably the greatest attempt to sting the
American people since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,”
-Senator Joseph Lieberman 11/14/01
NRDC’s MURKOWSKI WATCH The Natural Resources Defense
Council (NRDC) has recently put together a collection of Senator Frank
Murkowski’s public statements in support of opening up the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The
purpose of this report is to set the record straight and present the facts as
they are, not as Senator Murkowski wants them to be. Below are several of the “Murkowski Myths”. How many jobs could Arctic Refuge oil development generate? Recently
Sen. Murkowski made statements on the Senate floor requesting that drilling
in the Arctic Refuge be part of the “economic stimulus package” Congress is
debating. (Note that he likes to refer to the refuge by its acronym, ANWR,
perhaps to avoid mentioning that the area is, first and foremost, a wildlife
refuge.) “I am going to finish with one point, and that is the stimulus. We are talking about a stimulus in this nation. What does a stimulus mean? It means different things to different people. To some it means jobs; to others it means tax relief. I defy any member of this body to tell me a stimulus that is more meaningful than authorizing the opening of ANWR because what it would do is it would provide hundreds of thousands of jobs. Not government jobs, private sector jobs in shipbuilding, in developing pipes and valves. It would start immediately.” (October 31) “I will close by outlining the
significance of the economic stimulus associated with this single issue. The
Department of Labor Massachusetts Survey indicates jobs, direct, 250,000; the
Wharton Econometrics Institute at the Fact: A recent analysis by labor
economist Dean Baker estimated that drilling in the Arctic Refuge would
generate a total of 46,300 jobs. That is less than the number of jobs our
economy generated in an average week from 1997 through 2000. Sen. Murkowski
and other drilling proponents often cite a 10-year-old American Petroleum
Institute-commissioned study by the Wharton Econometric Forecasting
Associates (WEFA), which is not affiliated with the How much oil is estimated to be in the Arctic
Refuge coastal plain? In a speech on the Senate floor on November 8, Sen. Murkowski said that our nation “is at risk use increased dependence on oil. What can we do about it? What we can do about it is increase domestic production. We are not going to relieve our dependence totally, but we will reduce it substantially.” In a May 8
interview with Bob Edwards, the host of National Public Radio’s “Morning
Edition,” Sen. Murkowski said, “The estimate [of oil in the Arctic Refuge
coastal plain] is anywhere from 5 billion barrels to 16 billion barrels. If
it were 16 billion barrels, it would be the largest discovery in In a March
20 appearance on CNN’s “Inside Politics,” Sen. Murkowski told Judy Woodruff,
“If there is a mean of 10 to 16 billion barrels in ANWR, which is the
estimate, it would be the largest field found in the world in 40 years.” FACT: Sen. Murkowski confuses the amount of oil that USGS estimates is technically recoverable with the amount it estimates is economically recoverable. USGS defines technically recoverable reserves as “the volume of petroleum representing that proportion of assessed in-place resources that may be recoverable using current recovery technology without regard to cost.” In other words, technically recoverable reserve estimates do not take into account the costs of oil exploration and production, which would make much of the oil too expensive to extract. USGS estimates the amount of technically recoverable oil in the refuge to range from a 5 percent chance there is 11.8 billion barrels of oil to a 95 percent chance there is 4.3 billion barrels, with a average (mean) estimate of 7.7 billion barrels. Despite what Sen. Murkowski stated in his letter to the Washington Post, USGS estimates that there is only a 1 percent chance there are 16 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the refuge. When USGS includes the costs of finding, developing, producing and transporting the oil to market, as well as a 12 percent profit margin, the agency’s estimate of the amount of recoverable oil from the Arctic Refuge is considerably less. It estimates that if the price of oil remains around $20 a barrel, there is a 5 percent chance there is nearly 7 billion barrels, a 95 percent chance there is less than 1 billion barrels, and a 50 percent chance (or mean estimate) there are 3.2 billion barrels of oil in the Arctic Refuge. (World oil prices have been below $20 a barrel for seven of the last 10 years, according to the Energy Information Administration.) We currently consume 7.1 billion barrels of oil a year; 3.2 billion barrels is less than what we consume in six months. (For more information go to: http://energy.usgs.gov/factsheets/ANWR/ANWR.html.) For the entire report,
please contact Chuck Clusen or Elliott Negin, 202-289-6868 at NRDC. AMERICANS WANT FUEL EFFICIENCY According
to a new bipartisan poll released by The Wilderness Society, a majority of
American voters (57 to 36 percent) reject the idea that allowing oil drilling
in the Arctic Refuge would increase national energy security, and endorse
increasing fuel efficiency as the single most effective action which could be
taken right now to reduce the country's dependence on oil and increase
national energy security. A
majority of Americans in all regions (54 to 38 percent) also reject the
notion that in light of declining economy and layoffs, we need to open the
Arctic Refuge for drilling in order to create 750,000 new jobs (the jobs
figure cited in a largely discredited 1990 report used widely by drilling
proponents). The
national poll was conducted by the Mellman Group (D) and Bellwether Research
(R). The margin of error is +/-3.1% in 95 out of 100 cases. For more
information, visit www.wilderness.org. ROBERT Actor Robert Redford
traveled to the U.S. Capitol Wednesday (11/14/01) to call on the U.S. Senate
to protect "I
am hopeful that the debate, which has yet to come, can get beyond partisan
bickering and get put before the public in an open and honest way. I think
the decisions we make right now will say a lot about us as a country." Redford was joined at a press conference by Sarah James, a member of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, and Senators Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), Russ Feingold (R-Wis.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) NOTES FROM THE FIELD This past Wednesday in
Take Action to save the Arctic Refuge Call and write your Senators and Representative daily! Get your Senators FAX and web sites here. Hold your representative accountable U.S. Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 Send a letter to the editor of your local
paper at: Express from the heart why your Representative, Senator and President George Bush should protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness. Include this web site so more citizens can see the land through pictures, take action online and join the network to be notified for demonstrations and action alerts. Call or write your representative: Don't know who your Representative is? Find out at Arctic Refuge Slide Show You can view a slide presentation about a 700 mile journey by foot and raft through the Arctic Refuge, a giant wilderness in imminent peril. Then take action to try to save it. This amazing land is threatened by U.S. President George Bush's call to destroy it for oil development. This is the last undeveloped section of Alaska's Arctic coast line, and a critical breeding ground for hundreds of thousands of caribou, more than a hundred species of birds, polar bear, musk ox, snowy owl, Arctic Char, Walrus, seal, Bowhead whale, snow geese, Arctic Tern, golden eagles and many more creatures. slide show for larger monitors - slide show for smaller monitors Schedule a slide show in your area: Arctic Quest Author Chad Kister will perform an enhanced version of the above slide show and get petition signatures, letters and contacts for the desperately needed campaign to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil development on the coastal plain. The Porcupine Caribou Herd migrates a thousand miles over the Brooks
Mountain Range from a range the size of But oil companies are poised to develop this coastal plain.
Development would devastate this last intact caribou herd and Arctic
ecosystem left in Arctic Refuge Expert and Activist Chad Kister has a slide presentation
that inspires people to act to send a letter or do more to save this largest
wilderness area left in Contact: Phone: (740) 707-4110 (cell and messages) or (740) 753-3888 Address: Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign;
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Note: Kister does not receive a salary for his work as Coordinator of the Arctic Refuge Defense Campaign. Nor does he receive compensation for his web design for this site. All donations are used for costs in getting the message out around the continent. |
