Bush Makes a Plea for Drilling in ANWR; the UK Guardian, Shockingly, Finds Another Pretty Picture Well Outside the Wasteland under Discussion to Illustrate the Story.

I mean, have you seen the parts of ANWR that hold the oil reserves? It's like this: if you drive East from Pasadena along the 210, and then head down toward Whittier, California, you will pass strip mine after strip mine—big stretches of phenomenally ugly, mega-industrial gashes in the landscape. And it's no better where the dirt hasn't been mined, notwithstanding the fact that a few of these stretches are in the shadows of the San Gabriels.

Not every stretch of undeveloped land is beautiful—not Prudhoe Bay (where, by the way, the caribou herds are thriving), and not the next wasteland over, which holds billions of barrels of oil.

But try to tell that to the Brits who are reporting on this story.

Oh, how pretty! And the picture was taken in ANWR, so it must be from the proposed drilling site; after all, the media wouldn't mislead us about something like that.

This is the terrain we're discussing; it might be on the Prudhoe side, and it might be on the ANWR side (Jonah Goldberg, from whom I stole the pic, makes the point that it's impossible to tell which side any given image is on without checking his notes. This is not the High Sierras we're talking about "despoiling"; the terrain is objectively ugly. So provided that the native flora and fauna are protected when the oil is harvested (as they are in Prudhoe Bay, though our technology for doing same is getting better and better), there is no reason not to avail ourselves of this important natural resource, to buy ourselves time as we develop alternative fuels.