Before the current energy crisis, I don’t think most Americans had even heard of ANWR, or the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. To environmentalists, the giant swath of land on the northern fringe of Alaska bordering Canada has a reputation as being one of the most majestic untouched wildernesses on an ever-shrinking globe. To those in the energy industry, it presents an unrivaled opportunity on domestic soil free from lunatics with RPGs. And in the current climate of $4 per gallon gasoline prices, ANWR has become the political catchphrase of the season to potentially garner millions of gracious votes in an election year.

Like many others, I have a beef with both current and past calls to open ANWR to oil and gas companies for exploration and extraction. While past proposals to open the region have been defeated handily with filibusters in times of relatively cheap energy prices on the market, the tendency of the average American to forego regard for the pristine wilderness in favor of financial relief seems poised to overcome longstanding political stonewalling. Thus, you have the current debate hinging not on growing the economy, but providing relief to ordinary folks.

It is because of this shift in emphasis that I even have a problem with the acronym ANWR being thrown about in public discourse the way it currently is. I understand it’s a mouthful to say the entire name of the region, but unfortunately to the layman, ANWR (pronounced ANWAR) sounds not like an area of pristine Arctic wilderness on domestic soil, but an Arabic word. Judging by the number of people who can’t even locate Iraq on a map, it seems plausible that many would misconstrue ANWR as that country’s Anbar province or at the very least, a place in the Middle East. Since Middle East to most equals two things; oil and Muslims, it is no wonder why anxious motorists are steamed that Congress hasn’t given the green light to tap the resource in a land where we’re already integrally involved.

Beyond skin-deep political maneuvering of this kind, the more pernicious aspect of the ANWR push has been its label as a remedy to the current energy crisis. This fantasy tends to operate under the belief that if approved, production will begin immediately and will only affect the relatively small 1002 area of the refuge that contains oil and gas, satisfying both customers and environmentalists. However, pushing ANWR exploration as a remedy for the short-term oil crisis and skyrocketing prices is like saying a family can move into a house before it’s built. Oil rigs and refineries are large capital undertakings that can’t be cobbled together in a couple of months. Even if emphasis was placed on drilling instead of refining in the short-term, the nearest existing refinery lies in Prudhoe Bay over 100 miles away. The notion of environmentally-friendly exploration is dissolved when in order to get the oil or refined gasoline out of the Alaskan interior, infrastructure has to be built in the form of pipelines and roads. This infrastructure would criss-cross a large expanse of not just the 1002 area, but of the Refuge at large in order to reach the sea or more populace centers like Fairbanks, disrupting the tundra through construction and both direct and indirect pollution.

Then there’s the question of how much oil is actually contained within the 1002 area of ANWR and what impact it would have on the energy markets. A 1998 USGS study revealed a mean value of 7.7 billion barrels with 4.3 billion on the low end and 11.8 billion at the top end. As a small portion of U.S. supply (lower than 10% total), the mean level would sustain current demand levels for around a decade. However, what happens after that decade? Is opening ANWR geared to buy the U.S. time to modernize its energy grid with renewables in this time of peak oil and diminishing reserves or is it simply a means of shutting up voters long enough to perpetuate the bull market further relaxations of regulation?

The final statement is one that should be examined. Currently, politicians in favor of opening ANWR tout it as a remedy for the crisis for the American motorist rather than the Wall Street Energy Trader. Their reasoning hinges on the belief that the fundamentals of the current crisis are ones we’ve seen before in terms of supply and demand. However, the notion that ANWR will succeed in stabilizing energy markets because the current crisis is one of supply and demand is also dubious at best. While it is true that supply and demand dynamics are responsible in large part for skyrocketing prices at the pump, there are a number of other important factors that would be left unchanged even if ANWR oil was to be injected onto the market.

The first is speculation. Rampant speculation on energy markets has played a significant role in driving the price of oil ever higher due in part to a provision of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) known popularly as the “Enron Loophole.” Drafted by former Senator Phil Gramm at the behest of the then-functioning energy giant Enron, the loophole exempts from regulation most over-the-counter single-stock trades and trading on electronic commodities markets. The loophole makes energy crises very conducive environments for ballooning stock prices and commodity prices. Before Enron’s collapse under the weight of its own fraud and bad accounting, its traders fueled through speculation the company’s stock through the California Energy crisis of the early years of the decade. Since online trading is now much more important than it was in 2000 and the loophole has yet to be closed, the much larger global energy squeeze is presenting an even greater incentive for speculators in a largely unregulated exchange market.

Speculation functions integrally with a second important factor influencing gas and oil prices: disruption. Civil strife and anger over the exploitative practices of oil giants in the oil-rich Niger Delta have induced hiccups in the global energy market for the past two years and even the shutdown of a single Norwegian rig in the North Sea this week was able to push prices over the record threshold once again. Terrorist activity in the Middle East and Indonesia as well as the impact of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf States in the U.S. all have a hand in driving up the price of an already-dwindling resource.

Finally, one should look at supply and demand through a more panoramic lens. The high price of oil doesn’t have so much do with the increasing domestic demand, but demand from the rapidly-growing economies of China and India. Even wholesale conservation and reduced demand in the U.S. won’t affect global petroleum prices much because developing economies will pick up the slack to fuel their own growth. Likewise, unless ANWR was a second Saudi Arabia (which it isn’t), this breakneck economic growth in the Eastern Hemisphere would still make oil a hot commodity that costs an arm and a leg.

Proponents of opening ANWR to energy exploration need to be taken to task. By the time drilling and refining in area 1002 is up and running, the American driver will have spent months and even years under the financial duress of an energy commodities market gone wild. By the time one of the United States’ final untouched natural treasures is spoiled for the purpose of alleviating the price at the pump, one has to wonder over a landscape of financially-ruined middle and lower-class Americans who the exploration of ANWR was really meant to benefit. I bet you can guess.