More Energy Follies

What this country needs is an energy strategy worthy of the enormous energy-related problems it faces: global warming, soaring energy costs and dependency on Middle East oil among them. Opening up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drill for oil and gas is not such a strategy. Yet that is the road the Bush administration is headed down once again.

At the administration's request, Senate Republicans have put a drilling provision into a budget resolution that could be voted on this week. Since budget resolutions can't be filibustered, Republicans need only a simple majority, 51 votes, to open up a wilderness that has been off limits to commercial exploitation since the Carter administration.

That tactic has not worked in the past. The Republicans came close in 1995, passing a budget with a drilling provision in it that President Bill Clinton vetoed, precipitating a government shutdown. They think they have the votes again this year, and this time they have a president only too eager to sign it.

In recent weeks, the administration has mounted a full-court press. Gale Norton, the interior secretary, and Samuel Bodman, the new energy secretary, recently toured the refuge with newer members of Congress, whose votes could be decisive.

In addition to the familiar economic arguments - that the refuge is America's last great untapped source of domestic oil and is crucial to its competitiveness - Ms. Norton emphasized one other line of thought, which she spelled out yesterday in an Op-Ed article in The Times. It is that drilling technology has advanced to the point where we are capable of extracting billions of barrels of oil without harming the refuge's fragile ecology or abundant wildlife.

Environmentalists beg to disagree. Where Ms. Norton sees undisturbed tundra, they see hundreds of miles of pipelines, roads and drilling platforms, which would fragment wildlife habitats and corrupt a wilderness that, according to recent polls, a majority of Americans wish to leave undisturbed. We have expressed such reservations ourselves. But what troubles us most about President Bush's fixation on drilling is what it says about the shallowness of his energy policy.

The numbers tell the story. The United States Geological Survey's best guess is that even at today's record-high prices - in excess of $50 a barrel - just under 7 billion barrels could profitably be brought to market. That's less than the 7.3 billion barrels this country now consumes in a year. At peak production - about 1 million barrels a day in 2020 or 2025 - the refuge would supply less than 4 percent of the country's projected daily needs.

Any number of modest efficiencies could achieve the same result without threatening the refuge. Simply closing the so-called S.U.V. loophole - making light trucks as efficient over all as ordinary cars - would save a million barrels a day. Increasing fuel-economy standards for cars by about 50 percent, to 40 miles per gallon, a perfectly reasonable expectation, would save 2.5 million barrels a day. And bipartisan commissions have offered even bigger ideas: tax credits to help automakers produce a whole new generation of fuel-efficient cars, for instance, or an aggressive biofuels program that would seek to replace one-quarter of the gasoline we use for cars with substitutes from agricultural products.

These programs would yield benefits - less dependency on foreign sources, a decrease in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - long after the last drop of oil had been extracted from the refuge.

Mr. Bush mentioned some of these ideas in a speech last week, but only in passing. His main emphasis was not on reducing demand, but on increasing supply by opening the refuge. That is where this administration has been ever since Dick Cheney's energy report of 2001. It was the wrong place to be then, and it is the wrong place now.