What LineSkiEastCoat said about the oil situation in Alaska is ludicrous. Every professor of geology that I have read statements from say that there is not enough oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Preserve to satisfy our country's needs for more than a year. And there is definitely not more oil there than in the entire Middle East, and not even more than in Russia (the world's second leading exporter of oil.) There is significant evidence that it would destroy the terrain and threaten wildlife. Tundra is extremely fragile terrain, and when you put in a major oil drilling operation, you tear up tundra for thousands of square acres, and hundreds of miles along the pipeline that would need to be installed. This reduces the area that is capable of supporting vegetation for the massive herds of elk that migrate across the area every year. In addition, the reason that our government and Alaska's government have supported drilling is because it brings in a lot of money to the Alaskan economy, and it supports Bush's theory that we can get off our dependence on foreign oil by drilling in the United States. Simply raising the standards for miles per gallon on every car in the U.S. by ONE MILE would equal all the oil that is in the Alaskan Wildlife Preserve in a very short period of time.
We have an old saying down on the bayou....Blehhhhh!!!