Lance differs from GOP field on Alaska oil drilling

Your right, Lance is a rino.  How long before we realize we need to tap our own resources?  Not including US oil company drilling, although the chinese and mexicans are drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is ok?

 If you don't like the price of gasoline, take a hard look at policies like these the leave us at the mercy of energy mined and drilled from abroad.

So I must be a RINO right?

Conservation is not an ideological issue, luckily now most Republicans realize that some peoole were wrong about climate change (global warming) being just a myth and having nothing at all to do with human activity.

Marty Marks may score points as a conservative running in a Republican primary cracking on the Sierra Club and Lance's environment friendly record, but it's that kind of record that will help in a general election. Also, I'm not quite sure there's a majority of primary Republican voters who aren't conservationists either, we like our open space here in New Jersey.

Republicans regularly talk about ridding our dependency on foreign oil, but how about ridding the dependency on oil period? Drilling in ANWR just puts the rising cost problem on hold for a little bit, but does nothing to support alternative energy plans. Of course the other side generally shutters at even considering nuclear power, but countries like France get most of their energy from it and it does not cause any greenhouse gasses. Sure, there is a legitimate safety issue of storing the radioactive material,  but if we want to get serious about lessening our dependency on oil now, it's the solution that's already there.

After all Republicans are the party of Teddy Roosevelt...

Rich snobs who have enough money to pay $4 per gallon for gasoline, can't find Alaska on a world map and care more about making themselves feel good about a bunch of animals they couldn't recognize than finding domestic oil sources.

These people have no place in the Republican Party.  We would be much better off if these environmental extremist nuts were Democrats.  Let them have the wacko voter more concerned about trees and animals than people.

Let Alaskans decide their state's fate.  Why should people who live 3,000 miles away tell Alaskans what is best for them?

Last time I checked I only wish I was rich...

Although I kinda agree with you on letting Alaska decide their own fate..but it becomes a federal issue if the rest of the country wants the oil if they were to decide it's fine with them. There's that whole other problem about letting them decide their fate as well since they'd probably get some good money/tax breaks from the drilling.

“If it is done in an environmentally sensitive way, she is for drilling in ANWR..." 

That is double talk by a campaign trying to get conservative support yet leaving room to pander to environmentalists.  In the end a candidate who does things like that always ends up bowing to the environmental lobby. 

The longer this race goes the more Whitman exposes herself as another New Jersey Republican who will stray from Republican principles.  We need a Representative who speaks the truth, has firm conservative Republican ideas and plans, and has the conviction to stand by his statements like Marks.

... believe that we labor under an obligation to our posterity to be responsible stewards of the land, air, and water.  Environmentalists believe that "nature" is sacred and that mankind's activities constitute a kind of blasphemy against God. 

 For the foreseeable future, we're going to depend upon oil for fuel, among other things.  We can get it from others -- like the Cubans, who are drilling off the FL coast -- including some unsavory sorts, like the Saudis, or we can develop our own supplies.  Given that the impact of drilling in the Arctic is essentially nil -- unless one considers a vista that no one ever sees to be "sacred" and worth preserving, for its own sake, free from the blight of the works of man -- ANWR is a perfect location to drill.  No one would ever know it's there, because no one every goes there.

 Sure, build more nukes, build wind farms in MA, but recollect that there's no such thing as an environmental free lunch: everything requires tradeoffs.  Drilling in ANWR is the least bad of the alternative oil supplies; it might even be the best, environmentally.

 Wonder how these folks feel about cheap, abundant hydropower, of the sort which Tocks Island might have produced...

 Although I agree that we should be allowed to drill in ANWR, the reality is that the technology to get the oil out of the ground will only dig us down so far.

 We have the technology NOW to allow us to develop alternative fuels on a LARGE SCALE, but unfortunately, the government heavily restricts any form of competition against the fossil fuels industry.

 Case in point: Willie Nelson sells a brand of Bio Diesel called "Bio Willie". The hoops that he and his colleague had to jump through in order to get their 1 service station up and running, and to allow the local farmers' coop to refine the fuel was almost insurpassable.

 Why? Henry Ford himself dispised the oil companies and preffered hemp oil to fuel the vehicles on his estate. Yet, Hemp is outlawed in the United States. Despite popular myth that you can somehow smoke hemp and get "high" the truth is the opposite, and "claims" that you can breed Marijauna into Hemp to make it suitable for the recreational smoker are competely false.

 Yet our government, in an effort to protect the oil lobbyists, continue to restrict or otherwise outlaw any other means of creating and utilizing alternative fuels. 

 I even know of someone in Sussex County who was fined by the state of New Jersey for failure to pay fuels tax because he has a Mercedes Benz converted to run on recycled cooking oil. 

 So the Democrats cry and complain about the environment, but they violate people's rights in the process, and the Republicans refuse to accept this as the desired direction of the populous, and look like greedy oil profiteers in the process.

 If Republicans would refine their thoughts on alternative fuels and clean environments, and apply common sense to make it their own by lifting the barriers and allowing the free market to offer the solutions, I'd bet you make alot of friends out of most of the "light hearted environmentalist".

First post to politicsnj and I say who I am.

Re: Kate Whitman's campaign manager saying “If it is done in an environmentally sensitive way, she is for drilling in ANWR ... Kate ... is very pro-environment -- to a point”.

Sounds like Kerry's "I was for it before I was against it" or Clinton's "it all depends on what your definition of 'is' is"!

The sooner we get off our over-reliance of fossil fuel, wherever its source, the better of we'll all be -- rightwingers, rino's, conservationists, environmentalists, treehuggers, christian fundamentalists, witches and warlocks, atheists, pagans, mainstream protestants, jews, muslims, catholics, unitarian/universalists, conservatives, liberal, and moderates alike!

We can lead and benefit or follow and fall behind.