Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge was kept out of the recent federal energy bill. But GOP congressional leaders have a plan: they want to call ANWR drilling a deficit-reduction measure, lie about the likely revenues, and ram it through that way.

Allen Smith of the Wilderness Society explains the plan in a Boston Globe op-ed:

...Congress earlier passed the FY 2006 Budget Resolution with instructions to the House and Senate resources committees to find $2.4 billion of "savings" in the Interior Department budget by Sept. 16. That Budget Resolution is also silent on Arctic Refuge, but majority leaders have indicated they will use those instructions to justify authorization of Arctic Refuge drilling. The plan would be to use inflated revenue projections to reconcile the FY 2006 Budget with current law.

Now, here's the lie:

Raising $2.4 billion from Arctic Refuge leasing will never happen. The Administration would have to receive oil industry bonus bids averaging $4,000 per acre for the 600,000 acres it would offer for lease to receive that much revenue.

Actual North Slope lease rates have averaged well below $100 per acre and are not expected to change. Just north of the Arctic Refuge in the Beaufort Sea, Minerals Management Service recently leased 618,751 acres to the oil industry for $46.7 million, an average of $75 per acre, not $4,000....

Got it? They cooked up a requirement for a specific amount of Interior Department savings, then they're going to declare that the magic revenue source will be ANWR -- even though ANWR leases would raise maybe 2% of what congressional leaders required.

The point of doing this in a budget bill is that a budget bill can't be filibustered.

It might not work, though -- most Democrats oppose the scheme, as do two dozen House Republicans. Stay tuned.