This little blurb from the latest issue of Forbes Magazine. Reposted here in full because it’s worth getting that much angrier:

Green-Colored Communism

This mailing [with pictures of polar bear cubs] for the Alaska Wilderness League under-scores why this country still doesn’t have a serious energy policy. For more than 20 years Congress has blocked drilling for oil and natural gas on a tiny piece of the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, even though experts estimate that this 2,000-acre area has 10 billion barrels or more of oil. Most of the Outer Continental Shelf is also off-limits to drilling, despite the fact that estimated reserves there exceed 85 billion barrels of oil and even greater amounts of natural gas.

Environmentalists portray the ANWR dispute as a big-oil plot to desecrate a beautiful, pristine area. This image is preposterous. That 2,000-acre lot is bleak, even in summer. The size of the drilling area would be about the equivalent of a sugar cube in a football stadium. And the technology exists to do the job in an absolutely environmentally sound way. This is not theory. Oil and/or gas drilling already takes place in more than 30 wildlife refuges in the U.S.

Worries about oil spills is what fuels opposition to opening up the bulk of the Outer Continental Shelf. Environmentalists are mute about the fact that last summer’s devastating hurricanes, including Katrina, which literally blew away offshore platforms, did not lead to oil spills like that of the Exxon Valdez.

Similarly ill-informed emotionalism has severely retarded the development of nuclear power in the U.S. If all of the nuclear plants that were on the drawing board had been built (before 1979’s Three-Mile Island accident effectively shut down new construction), we might actually be in compliance with Al Gore’s beloved Kyoto Protocol.

Sadly, environmental extremists are not using the green movement to give us cleaner air and a higher standard of living as we grow and expand economically but to halt economic progress altogether. Socialism and communism are dead, discredited by the ghastly experiences of the 20th century. But the socialist agenda lives on in this perversion of environmentalism.

–Steve Forbes