Ed Markey: “Mr. Chairman, when is 2,000 acres, not 2,000 acres? Well, it is when we are talking about the Wilson amendment. This…”

“Mr. Chairman, when is 2,000 acres, not 2,000 acres? Well, it is when we are talking about the Wilson amendment. This amendment does not mandate that the 2,000 acres be contiguous or that we count roads necessary for production or the gravel mines necessary to build the roads and the pipelines necessary to move oil to market. It would only count when their support posts touch the ground. This is accounting that would make Arthur Andersen very proud. I have a poster which shows my colleagues what proponents of this amendment want us to believe will happen in the Arctic refuge. Here is the red dot placed randomly on the 1002 area of the Arctic refuge, what we are all debating about. The dot is intended to mislead us into believing that its impact on the refuge would be very small. None of us, of course, knows exactly what the industry would do if we let them loose in the refuge because drilling and producing oil is a messy, inexact, unpredictable business. One thing we know for sure is that it would not look like a nice, neat, red dot on a white background. The overlay is much more realistic in terms of what we can expect.”