For someone who's supposed to
For someone who's supposed to be so smart, George Will can be awfully sloppy with the facts when he wants to make some clever point. He writes:
"If you have an average-size dinner table, four feet by six feet, put a dime on the edge of it. Think of the surface of the table as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The dime is larger than the piece of the coastal plain that would have been opened to drilling for oil and natural gas."
That's a nice image, George. Except that the oil's not all in one place. It's spread throughout the 1.5-million acres of the refuge in roughly 30 small deposits. The roads, pipelines, gravel mines, and other various and sundry infrastructure-type items required to connect those 30 deposits are exempted from the 2,000 acre "dime" George imagines for us. So, instead of a small swatch of industrialized land, there could be dozens oil fields of various sizes, docks, and seawater treatment plants scattered throughout the refuge, all linked by roads cut through virgin forest. This doesn't even take into account the exploration trails and water-withdrawal sites that would be required by the operation. For more info, and a speculative oil-development plan that meets with the defeated law's criteria, go here.
I'm not particularly a "Bushwatch.net" fan, but I have respect for footnotes and research.
C'mon, George...can't you spring for a research assistant? No, wait--I get it! Facts would get in the way, wouldn't they? Why spend money for a research assistant when you wouldn't use what they found anyway? We must therefore commend George for his frugality.
Way to go!
