**By David O. Williams **
Confronted with Sarah Palin's nationally broadcast campaign to push Republican presidential nominee John McCain to embrace drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), environmentalists have formed a 527 group to fight Palin and her oil-and-gas industry allies.
"Drilling has gone from being a congressional issue to a presidential campaign issue," said Emilie Surrusco, spokeswoman for the Alaska Wilderness Political Fund, a political organization formed in the last month by the nonprofit Alaska Wilderness League.
"We wanted to be able to comment on [drilling] in the context of the presidential campaign, because the main goal of both organizations is protecting Alaska's wilderness, and a big part of that is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and also the Arctic Ocean, where there's movement for offshore drilling."
Much of that movement is coming from Palin. She said during last week's only vice presidential debate with Democrat Joe Biden that she will keep pushing McCain on the issue.
While ANWR didn't come up specifically in Tuesday night's presidential debate, Barack Obama continued to sound the alarm that the United States has only 3 percent of the world's petroleum reserves but consumes 25 percent of the supply and therefore cannot drill its way out of the current energy crisis.
McCain fired back that domestic drilling, including off-shore production, must be stepped up to "bridge the gap" until a wider range of alternative energy sources are available. Obama argued that approach doesn't adequately address the immediate impacts that burning fossil fuel has on global climate change.
Surrusco said the Alaska Wilderness Political Fund 527 group (named for the IRS tax code that covers such political advocacy organizations) was formed to refute several myths Palin has been advancing since receiving the vice presidential nomination in late August.
"ANWR, of course, is a 2,000-acre swath of land in the middle of about a 20-million-acre swath of land," Palin said in a Sept. 11 interview on ABC. "Two-thousand acres that we’re asking the feds to unlock so that there can be exploration and development."
Surrusco says that assessment leaves out some crucial details. "The U.S. [Geological Survey] has shown that the oil speculated to be there is actually in small pockets spread across the whole coastal plain... In fact, 800 wells would have to be drilled to access the oil and those wells would have to be connected by a series of roads and pipelines, and then they'd have to create gravel pits and airstrips, and all kinds of infrastructure would have to be built that would be spread across the entire coastal plain."
Surrusco also said Palin overplays Alaska's role as a domestic energy producer, even feeding the line to McCain, who, during an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, called Palin the "governor of a state that 20 percent of America’s energy supply comes from." In fact, Surrusco said, that figure is closer to 3 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Read the rest of the post at Colorado Independent.