Dec. 14 --  The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the highest profile environmental battleground during the presidential election, will not be recommended for national monument status, the Interior Department told MSNBC.com on Thursday. President-elect George W. Bush has promised to open part of the refuge to oil drilling, and environmentalists have been lobbying President Bill Clinton to expand its federal protection by declaring it a national monument.   

CLINTON COULD still act on his own, but Interior Department spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna said Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt "is not recommending" monument status "because he does not believe the refuge would receive any additional protection that way."

Instead, Hanna said, Babbitt has advised seeking stronger protections by getting Congress to pass legislation making the refuge a federal wilderness, thus permanently banning any oil drilling there.

Environmentalists said they felt Babbitt -- one of the strongest opponents of oil drilling in the refuge -- had decided not to fight for national monument status because doing so might anger conservative Republicans and prompt them to reverse not only any Arctic monument status, but also the dozen national monuments created during the Clinton administration.
       
EYES ON CONGRESS
"We think Secretary Babbitt's fear ... is not necessarily borne out by political reality," said Gene Karpinski, head of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.   

The group, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council and others, on Thursday delivered 650,000 postcards to the White House urging Clinton to declare an Arctic National Monument.

But a White House official said "there is no process under way here to evaluate any such proposal."

Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski, the Republican head of the Senate energy panel, favors drilling in the Arctic refuge and has indicated he would try to overturn any attempt by Clinton to declare it a national monument.

The postcard campaigners also warned Bush not to open the refuge to drilling.

"If President-elect Bush picks a fight on this issue, we think that's a big political mistake," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney for the National Resources Defense Council.

That warning stems from the fact that Congress would have to change federal law to open up the refuge, and Bush would face strong opposition from Democrats and possibly even moderate Republicans.
       
DRILL OR CONSERVE? 

Conservationists have described the area along Alaska's northeast coast, home to polar bears and caribou, as "America's Serengeti."

Bush, a former Texas oilman, has said opening part of the refuge to exploration and drilling would be a key component of his energy policy to help make the nation more self-sufficient. Any drilling would be limited to 1.5 million acres of the refuge's total 19 million acres, he has said.

Environmental groups contend that the potential oil available there is relatively insignificant, would take a decade to develop and would have no impact on gasoline prices in the United States.

"We have a cheaper and better way to get that oil -- through conservation" and higher fuel standards for cars, Kennedy said.   

The federal government has estimated that about 3.2 billion barrels of oil could be economically produced from the Arctic refuge, an amount representing less than six months of U.S. energy consumption.

The United States imports more than half of its oil supplies, and domestic oil production has fallen to a 50-year low.
       
Reuters contributed to this story.

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