Editorial: Here comes another bad idea out of Rep. Don Young

Monday, November 28, 2011  

"Say this for Congressman Don Young: He is thoroughly predictable and, on energy and environmental matters, almost always wrong.

For the last 38-plus years, Mr. Young, Republican of Alaska, has specialized in bringing copious pork dollars to his home state. He is also unmatched as a fountain of dubious ideas — unnecessary roads through protected wildlife refuges, clear-cutting in old-growth forests like the Tongass, and not one but two infamous “bridges to nowhere” that would have provided access to thinly populated parts of Alaska at gigantic cost.

Now comes another effort by Mr. Young to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling — specifically, the refuge’s coastal plain, a narrow 1.6 million-acre wilderness that flanks the Beaufort Sea and is home to caribou, polar bears, wolves and dozens of rare arctic bird species. Bruce Babbitt, the former interior secretary, once said that opening the plain to drilling would be as insulting as building a hyrdroelectric dam in the Grand Canyon."

Get the Story:
Editorial: The Curious Don Young (The New York Times 11/27)