Posted on: Wednesday, November 20, 2002

EDITORIAL
Look to GOP to renew attack on environment

Democratic senators should have driven a stake into its heart when they had the chance. Surely that's how environmentalists feel about the Bush administration's hopes to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Yet again, the issue is back from the dead.

It was hard enough to prevent this needless wilderness exploitation when the Democrats enjoyed a majority. To our disappointment, Hawai'i's senators, Dan Inouye and Dan Akaka, sided with Republicans when the issue was defeated in April.

ANWR drilling leads a long list of efforts we expect from the Bush administration to roll back environmental and energy progress of decades. They include opening of public lands for coal mining and oil and gas drilling. Look for an attack on enforcement of the landmark National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, signed by President Nixon.

Leadership changes in the Senate will facilitate the administration's anti-environmental onslaught, with an environment committee chaired by James Inhofe, R-Okla., who wants to further scale back the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Energy and Natural Resources Committee under Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who aims, among other things, to increase spending on nuclear energy.

Hawai'i's senators often vote in tandem with Alaska's senators, with laudable results, such as healthy maintenance of defense and Native Hawaiian programs. But Alaska residents profit directly from environmental exploitation — indeed, they will have to begin paying taxes in that state if North Slope oil royalties peter out — and Alaska's senators have teamed with anti-environment hard-liners in order to form a pro-ANWR drilling coalition.

Federal spending in Hawai'i is important, of course. But it's time for Akaka and Inouye to put principle ahead of pork when it comes to the environment.