Bush increases pressure to secure his pet projects

"Bipartisanship" in the Bush lexicon has a habit of meaning "follow me, or else". This week, draping himself in the American flag, the President appealed to legislators to put aside their differences for the sake of national security in time of war and to back two deeply divisive projects, approval for fast-track negotiating authority in the World Trade Organisation, and for a rapid passage of his pet energy Bill, now stuck in the Senate.

Both are deeply sensitive issues for the Democrats, the former, allowing the President to circumvent trade liberalisation concerns of trade unions and their supporters in Congress, the latter, an opportunity to bulldoze through legislation allowing, among other things, exploration for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wilderness Reserve (ANWR).

National security? You may well ask. Democrats certainly feel he's chancing his arm. Mr Bush has argued that a WTO agreement would help to generate wealth in the Third World, undermining the causes of Islamic extremism. And drilling in ANWR was crucial, he said, because "the less dependent we are on foreign sources of crude oil, the more secure we are at home" The idea that the US could reduce its dependence by cutting profligate consumption is not on the agenda.

Many experts estimate that the amount of oil beneath ANWR's coastal plain would supply the nation's needs for a maximum of only six months and would take 10 years to get to market.

Unwilling to appear unpatriotic many Democrats have already stomached a number of projects that would otherwise be anathema, but have started to fight back on the current $35 billion economic stimulus Bill whose tax breaks to giant corporations has enraged them.

The ANWR cause is precarious. The House has already backed it and the Senate Energy Committee's discussion on the Bill had to be suspended by the Democratic leadership when it became apparent to them they did not have the votes to force through amendments. It is now stuck in legislative limbo, or at least was until the President showed renewed interest.

ANWR, a major preoccupation of the environmental movement is described by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as "one of the finest examples of wilderness left on the planet". The controversy involves opening 1.5 million acres of the refuge's 19 million acres to exploration.

But the exploration area involves the narrow strip of land between the giant Brooks Mountain range and the Beaufort Sea which in summer is rich in mosses and lichens on which a huge variety of wild birds and animals feed. Most crucially it is the traditional calving area for the 135,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd.

In the winter as the caribou move north with their young through the mountains, the frozen coastal plain becomes home to many of the region's pregnant polar bears who den there.

Now there are claims that the Government suppressed from Congress two reports which suggest drilling in ANWR would breach an international treaty protecting polar bears, and the Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, has been accused of misleading Congress on one of her own agencies' assessment of the impact on the caribou.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, a biological agency in the Interior Department, warned in two internal reports that opening the refuge to development might put the US out of compliance with the five-nation International Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears. But those reports never reached Congress. One of the 1995 reports, Habitat Conservation Strategy for Polar Bears in Alaska, noted that the Arctic refuge contains "the greatest concentration of denning polar bears in Alaska," with "the heaviest denning" in the 1.5 million acre coastal plain.

Today, even Interior's website acknowledges that drilling could affect denning in the Arctic: "Because the highest densities of maternal land denning overlaps with potential oil and gas development in the \coastal plain, disturbance from exploration and development activities could cause den abandonment by pregnant females or females with new-born cubs." "This is a classic Bush Administration strategy of running roughshod over international agreements," says Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Centre for Biological Diversity.

The group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, has unearthed evidence that Ms Norton changed scientific data from the Fish and Wildlife Service before passing it on to the Senate Energy Committee in July.

She had been asked how oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would affect the Porcupine Caribou herd. The service said the herd had calved in the disputed area for 27 of the past 30 years. But Ms Norton told senators that calving had occurred outside the area for 11 of the past 18 years.

Later she claimed she simply transposed words, writing "outside" instead of "inside". The agency also told Ms Norton that drilling activity elsewhere in Alaska appears to disrupt calving, but she told senators that data does not support any such theory.