The fate of the coastal plane of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), located in Alaska, is of great importance to all Americans, despite the reserve’s remote setting. For the last five years, advocates for opening part of ANWR to oil drilling have argued that the land would best serve the public interest if it were leased to energy companies for development. Environmentalists have countered that the coastal plane, one of the few remaining stretches of absolutely pristine land in America, should not be sacrificed to meet short-term energy needs.

An article published in the New York Times on Feb. 21 essentially sums up a trend that has become more and more obvious over the last several years: oil companies are no longer interested in drilling in ANWR because the gains would be so minor. Because there is no economic incentive to drilling other than creating short-term, unsustainable jobs for some Alaskans, the drilling debate should be complete. However, it is not; the Bush administration, in spite of disinterest in drilling on the parts of BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron Texaco and ConocoPhillips, has continued to promote drilling in ANWR.

This makes no sense. The costs of drilling are high; even under ideal best practices, the wild populations of caribou, polar bears, musk oxen and more than 200 species of migratory birds that depend on the integrity of the local ecosystem to survive would disappear or be severely compromised. And the downsides of drilling are not limited to the endangerment of irreplaceable animal populations and the degradation of pristine wild lands. The Gwichin people of Northern Alaska depend on the migratory porcupine caribou for food and shelter and their very way of life. To disrupt caribou territory with oil drilling would amount to a genocidal disruption of the Gwichin culture.

The repercussions of drilling are serious, but would the benefits justify them? The New York Times reports that the major oil companies are largely uninterested in drilling in the refuge and that spokespeople for ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips are at most uninterested in pursuing Arctic drilling. BP, ConocoPhillips and Chevron Texaco have already pulled support from Arctic Power, the premier lobbying group for drilling in ANWR. If energy companies, businesses whose sole purpose it is to make money from exploiting energy resources, are uninterested in drilling, the economic incentive for doing so must be tiny. Is that incentive worth compromising a piece of America’s heritage?

Finally, assuming that the Bush administration, which furtively slipped plans for drilling into its projected annual budget, did open up ANWR, and assuming that energy companies showed any interest in drilling there, gains in energy independence would be negligible. Public geological surveys predict that any oil extracted from the reserve would, when made available 10 years from the initiation of drilling, meet only a tiny fraction of America’s needs. The Ohio Student Public Research Interest Group estimates that ANWR reserves would increase domestic oil reserve levels by roughly .3 percent.

Drilling in ANWR would leave us a poorer nation still dependent on unreliable energy sources and robbed of one of our greatest national treasures. A cost-benefit analysis of the situation clearly shows that the price of drilling in ANWR is just too high.