Six short months ago, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Baked Alaska) was a moderate Republican, speaking eloquently on the effects of climate change in her home state, and considered a swing vote on the climate bill.

Then she introduced an anti-science resolution to gut the Clean Air Act by disapproving the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases. And her effort has spawned clone resolutions in the House. (Today she backed down a little, announcing support of Senator Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) plan for a two year freeze on the EPA’s ability to enforce its rules.)

But that’s not enough. Now she wants to incorporate drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as the price of her vote on a climate bill.

The Hill’s E2 blog has the quote:

“To secure my vote on a climate bill, we have to develop a good policy. In my mind that good policy would include ANWR as part of a domestic production title,” she told reporters in the Capitol.

Established in December 1960, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Its 20 million acres contain five different ecosystems from coastal marine to boreal forests, and it’s home to the largest diversity of life in the Arctic, including 37 species of mammals and nearly 200 migratory bird species. It’s also a political hot potato because it is claimed to hold billions of barrels of oil. Prior Republican efforts to open up the land to drilling have been consistently defeated.

As a Presidential candidate, Barack Obama opposed drilling in ANWR. So do Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), two-thirds of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman trio rewriting a climate bill. So do most Democrats. Today, Lieberman affirmed his support for ANWR and labeled Murkowski’s demand a non-starter. Using her logic, the bill would become a parody of itself:

  • Let’s destroy a large piece of the Arctic to save the Arctic!
  • Let’s drill for oil to end our dependence on oil!
  • Almost as good as coal producing state Senators’ logic: Let’s blow up mountaintops and pour billions of dollars into pretending to clean up coal instead of using energy that’s clean from the start!

Mainstream environmental groups who’ve been lobbying for a climate bill, and spent years lobbying to preserve ANWR, know that any bill permitting ANWR drilling in the name of the planet only makes sense in an Orwellian world. Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club states:

Drilling in the Arctic Refuge is, has been, and always will be a non-starter. Drilling for more oil at one of the places most impacted by global warming is perhaps the furthest thing from a solution that I can imagine.

So why is she even suggesting something so quickly labeled a nonstarter?

Two unsavory possibilities suggest themselves. She may be signalling that her vote is not gettable at all except by complete capitulation to Big Oil’s interests. Alternatively, she may be making this ludicrous-on-its-face suggestion in order to fall back to her real position: a substantial expansion of offshore drilling in, e.g., the Beaufort and Chukchi seas north of Alaska. In either case, she’s close to abandoning the pretense that she represents the people of Alaska over her Big Oil donors.