OIL IN THE SEA

Some 92% of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska is off limits to development. The rest was put aside by Con-gress in 1980 for possible oil exploration. It includes a 20 by-100 mile coastal strip, essentially a frozen desert, that could be a second Prudhoe Bay (now producing 25% of US domestic Oil). Alaska officials and the local Eskimos unanimously support the development, which would "disturb" 0.1% of the refuge's total area. But bills to allow development were stopped dead in their tracks by the Valdez spill, played to the hilt by the wildlife in Washington's de-industrializing lobbies.

But how much of a disaster was it? That question was taken apart last July by Dr. James E. Mielke, a marine and earth sciences specialist, and gratifying proof that not all scientists are Ehrlichs or Sagans, and that even in the government there are honest scientists who go by the evidence rather than by fashion and media glory. Mielke works for the Congressional Research Service (Library of Congress), and unfortunately his outstanding 34 page report to Congress "Oil in the ocean: the short and long-term impacts of spilled oil" (CRS no.90-356 SPR, 7/24/90) is not available to the public, but perhaps your Congressman, who has just gone on a $100,000 star-vation wage, can get it for you. I did not see a comma from it quoted by the mass media; surprisingly, Science did report it soon after its publication.

The report is highly readable and easily understood (after all, even the Hon. Dole was expected to read it), and most informative. It explains the details of the various processes by which nature cleans the oil in the sea (much of it gets there from natural seeps), and gives details of the effects of a spill, including their durations. He notes the benefits of a spill as food for the marine ecosystem; there are ecosystems that live on natural seeps east of Galveston, Tex. This has been amply confirmed since the report was publish- ed: the catch of pink salmon and herring in the Gulf of Alaska broke all previous records by a wide margin after the Valdez spill a spill of less than 16%, by oil volume, of the healed Amoco Cadiz spill off Brittany in 1978. Another of Mielke's points con-firmed by recent experience is that the later phases of clean-up are best left to nature: Walter Reilly's sandblasting and rock-cleaning publicity hunters damage the environment.

"The life span of the media coverage has been shorter than major ecological impact of the spill, but probably of greater sig-nificance." One year after the Valdez, the city of Valdez issued a report showing that the loss of wildlife was a small fraction of exist-ing populations in the sound. But the sham-environmentalist Alas-ka Coalition called on Congress to establish a memorial for the wildlife lost by declaring the ANWR a wilderness area.

The spills are regrettable, of course, but unavoidable in the large traffic of oil. A Valdez type spill would occur every 13 years, or every 11,600 transits.

If the Princes of Exxon were not such spineless wimps, they would devote a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions they pay in protection money to the sham-environmentalists on reprinting this (uncopyrighted) eye opener and giving it the widest possible dis-tribution.

But no: they do not even understand that when you pay protec-tion money to the Mafia, at least they protect you; but the Sierra Club and the NRDC are not that honest.