Quit relying on temporary fixes

I am a little amazed that Bush is still trying to push drilling in ANWR through Congress since it's been defeated in the Senate twice, but I guess it isn't that surprising since the guy is amazingly persistent when it comes to getting what he wants. Almost as amazing is that people have deluded themselves into thinking that this will be such a great boon for the economy. It's not as though we'll actually become oil exporters or anything. There isn't much oil there--only enough to power the U.S. for 6 months or 3 years, depending on the source you use. I hear 6 months cited a lot more often, and given the current rate of energy consumption it's the one I'm more inclined to believe. Six months of oil sounds like a lot when it is spread over 100 people, but over the 270,000,000 in the United States, not so much.
The most ignorant and callous reaction I have heard to this so far is, "Open ANWR up for drilling, the polar bears will be fine." Of course we'd be upset if the polar bear was (and of course it is, and so we are) endangered, but the ramifications of this action go so far beyond the polar bear. Bush has told us that the oil is only in an area the size of a small airport, but he manages to give the misleading impression that that is the only area that would be damaged. The spots where the oil is located are found at different locations in the park, so the environmental impact to the area would be a lot moire extensive than he lets on. The companies that are planning to drill there would go in over the wetlands bounding the area, and as I have mentioned before, it takes wetlands a very long time to recover from such damage, if they recover at all. A lot of habitat for migrating birds and caribou would be either damaged or completely wiped out, to say nothing of the polar bear. Too many people think that area is a frozen wasteland. Clearly, they have no idea how ecology works, or that people live in those areas even if they see them as uninhabitable.
Finally, drilling more oil just prolongs the problem of global warming. We need to seek and implement answers now, before it's too late. It's hard to do that when our politicians are blithely telling anyone who will listen that things are just peachy and that ecologists are making a big deal out of nothing, as though we have nothing better to worry about.
A lot of Alaskans are all for the idea, and with good reason. It would bring a lot of outside money into the state, but only temporarily. I have a hunch that if you talk to the people in far northern tribes who depend on solid ice and migrating caribou for survival, you'd get a different opinion.