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Administration Takes Anti-Environmentalism To New Low

Though the Senate has blocked efforts to drill in the Arctic wildlife refuge for years, the Bush administration yesterday gave oil and gas companies perhaps the next best option.

Teshekpuk, Alaska is a 389,000 acre region featuring “ideal and critical habitat” for “some of the world’s largest congregations of migratory geese, as well as caribou and other wildlife,” according to the Anchorage Daily News.

Already 87% of the region was already open to oil and gas firms. But not even Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt — described by the NRDC’s Greg Wetstone as the most “intensely controversial and blatantly anti-environmental political appointee” in modern times — was willing to open up the area directly surrounding Teshekpuk Lake.

Not President Bush. His plan makes every last acre available:

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The Los Angeles Times notes that the move to develop the area came “in response to requests by Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force.”