These guys start throwing numbers around and who're you gonna believe? This article says the reserves in ANWR could supply U.S. demands for two years; article Life After Oil in the current issue of Utne Reader says six months...

Paul Harvey's commentary suggested boosting coal production as an alternative, ostensibly because there's a lot of it. A fine fuel, but Dios Mios, about as sooty as it gets...(cut to panoramic photograph of London, England some one hundred years ago). Not to mention currently the most profitable methods of extracting it from the ground do great harm to the environment (fade in soundtrack of John Prine's "Paradise" and the line about "the world's biggest shovel...").

It would still be a great concern, but less so if all the carbon dioxide these fuels spew into the air made golf in January at ANWR the stuff of science fiction....