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| Election 2000 One
Bush Helps Another |
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For the second time in a year, President Bush has moved to limit offshore drilling for oil and natural gas along Florida's Gulf Coast. He also proposed to buy the privately held oil, gas and other mineral rights under three nature preserves adjacent to Everglades National Park. If approved by Congress, his proposals will protect the beaches that provide much of Florida's tourist income, and will greatly assist the fragile South Florida ecosystem, which has suffered from development and years of official neglect. It is hardly coincidental that they will also help his brother Jeb's re-election prospects in the Florida governor's race this fall. The Everglades proposal will cost $120 million, which Congress must supply. The president will seek $115 million more to purchase seven oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico south of Pensacola. This proposal is a worthy sequel to Mr. Bush's decision last summer to reduce the area available to leasing in the eastern gulf to about one-quarter the acreage approved by the Clinton administration in 1997. Members of Congress who worry about the costs should be aware of powerful precedents. Facing similar opposition to drilling near the Florida Keys, the Clinton administration bought back 73 leases for $200 million. President Bill Clinton also won special appropriations for several important acquisitions, including $65 million to acquire a gold mining operation that threatened Yellowstone National Park and $250 million to acquire the Headwaters redwood forest in California from a private timber company. California politicians promptly demanded that Mr. Bush buy up 36 equally controversial leases off the Santa Barbara coastline, while environmentalists noted the inconsistency between the president's laudable efforts to protect his brother's state and his aggressive if unsuccessful attempt to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The White House saw no such conflict, arguing that the people of Florida wanted protection whereas Alaskans wanted to drill. Nevertheless, as a general matter, the president's sensitivity to Florida contrasts sharply with the carelessness that has marked his quest for more oil and gas in some other parts of the country — most glaringly in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, where a giant methane project has been moving forward with insufficient regard for its impact on local rivers and water supplies. One can only hope that the Florida proposals represent the beginning of a more diligent effort to balance the country's energy needs with its environmental imperatives.
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