Alaska drilling supporters awarded key interior posts

By Yereth Rosen

Anchorage, Alaska, June 17-- The head of a group campaigning for oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and an Alaska lawmaker who has promoted North Slope oil development have been appointed to key Interior Department positions.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton said on Saturday she has appointed Cam Toohey as her special assistant for Alaska and state Sen. Drue Pearce as a senior adviser on Alaska issues.

Development backers hailed the appointments but environmentalists slammed them.

Since 1996, Toohey has been executive director of Arctic Power, an Anchorage-based lobbying group with the campaign for ANWR drilling as its sole purpose. He will be based in Anchorage, overseeing the Interior Department’s Alaska operations. Pearce, an Anchorage Republican who served two terms as president of the state Senate, will be based in Washington. Hers is a new position.

Norton said the Bush administration remains committed to promoting oil development in the Arctic refuge, despite opposition from environmentalists and the recent shift of power in the US Senate to the Democrats, who generally oppose the drilling plans.

Oil from the refuge’s coastal plain “needs to be considered in any debate” about a national energy policy, Norton said at a news conference in Anchorage.

“It’s such a large resource that it cannot be ignored,” she said. “Even at the low-end estimates we could get as much oil from the (coastal plain) area as we get from (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein. It’s a choice the American public has to make.” Development backers welcomed Norton’s selections.

“These appointments are great for Alaska,” Oliver Leavitt, chairman of the Barrow-based Arctic Slope Regional Corp., said in a prepared statement. Arctic Slope, a regional corporation owned by the Inupiat Eskimos of the North Slope, has long pushed for oil development in the Arctic refuge.

Environmentalists criticized the appointments.

“Today we’ve seen a hostile takeover of the Interior Department by the oil industry,” said Sara Callaghan Chapell, an Alaska spokeswoman for the Sierra Club. Instead of appointing stewards for Alaska’s resources, Norton has “chosen cheerleaders for Big Oil,” she said.

The Arctic refuge’s coastal plain, which could hold 3 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil, according to Interior Department estimates, is also the calving ground for a huge herd of caribou. Environmentalists say the narrow coastal plain, wedged between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean, is critical to the ecosystem of the Arctic region.

Alaska is the only state to receive the dedicated attention from senior advisers, said Norton, who was visiting Anchorage. That is appropriate, she said, because so much of the vast state is managed by the Interior Department, from national parks and wildlife refuges to Native American tribal affairs.

“Alaska is unique in that respect. This is so much of a part of what the department does,” she said.

The positions are especially important “because of the approach that the Bush administration is using on environmental issues,” Norton said.

“We want to involve local people in the decision-making. We want to use a consensus-building approach, involving environmentalists and industry and business people and farmers and ranchers and everybody who will be affected by our decisions,” she said.

Source: Reuters

Biotech crops threaten farmers, environment

Washington, DC, June 18 (ENS)-- Almost 30,000 field tests of genetically engineered organisms were authorized by the Department of Agriculture between 1987 and 2000, shows a new report by the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) and the Genetically Engineered Food Alert coalition.

These tests pose serious environmental and contamination threats, and inadequate regulations are in place to monitor their impacts, the groups argue.

Their report, “Raising Risk: Field Testing of Genetically Engineered Crops in the US,” documents for the first time the extent of field testing of genetically engineered crops in the US and highlights the potential risks associated with the release of engineered genes into the environment.

“Our environment is being used as a laboratory for widespread experimentation on genetically engineered organisms with profound risks that, once released, can never be recalled,” said Richard Caplan, environmental advocate for US PIRG and report author. “Until proper safeguards are in place, this unchecked experiment should cease.”

Experimental field crop plots threaten to contaminate the crops of traditional farmers, who often do not have information about where test plots of genetically engineered crops are growing, the report says.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are investigating StarLink, a genetically engineered corn, not approved for human consumption because it may be a human food allergen. Last year, the Genetically Engineered Food Alert showed that StarLink had contaminated the human food supply, forcing the FDA to recall over 300 food products and costing farmers, food processors and the grain industry millions of dollars in lost profit.

“If any one of the 29,000 experimental test plots has cross pollinated with local agriculture crops they could have the same effect on the US food supply as StarLink has,” Caplan said.

Key findings of the report include:

More than 60 percent of all field tests conducted in the last year now contain secret genes classified as “Confidential Business Information,” which means that the public has no access to information about experiments being conducted in their communities.

Between 1987-2000, Monsanto or its subsidiaries applied to conduct almost 2,000 field tests - more than any other company.

Since 1995, seven of the top 10 companies seeking to conduct field tests have merged into two companies: Monsanto and DuPont.

“Any new technology must be tested, but there are important scientific issues that must be addressed before genetically engineered foods can be released into the environment even in the context of testing,” said Paul Muegge, a farmer and Oklahoma state senator. “To conduct field tests before this has been done is both premature and hazardous; it is like carrying out clinical trials of a drug before the laboratory tests are complete.”