They’re doing it again…

The Alaskan senators have introduced legislation (yet again) to allow drilling in the Arctic Refuge if the price of oil hits $125/barrel for five days straight.  Senator Murkowski offers a trade-off: open the ANWR for drilling, and the federal government will use those revenues for alternative energy development.  In my mind, that’s not really a fair swap.  Plus, I’m pretty sure that most of the revenues will be used to lower the cost of gas at the pump, so it would better be stated that “a small percentage of the revenues will be used for alternative energy development.”

Anyway, I just want to use my infinitesimally-small part of the e-sphere to urge you to write to your senators and ask them not to back the new legislation.  Encourage them to put their backing behind legislation that would fund renewable energy R&D *without* the false trade of drilling in the ANWR.  Remind them that a great deal of American technological leadership is moribund, but that this area still hasn’t really even begun to be explored and is therefore wide open.  It doesn’t take very long - every single senator, as far as I can tell, has a web-based contact form, and if you write one good email, you can copy and paste it to the other senator.