Why are politicians so zealous about drilling for oil in Alaska? Would it really affect gas prices?

I heard it would increase total production by only a few percentage points and that the environmental cost could be fairly large.





Just curious.Why are politicians so zealous about drilling for oil in Alaska? Would it really affect gas prices?
Of course it's true that anything we produce here means less we need to buy from elsewhere.





But what the 'drill baby drill' crowd never mentions is that if you start planning right now where to put your next drills, it takes a while to ready the site, set up the drill, and drill to the oil. It would be about 5 - 7 years before we got a single drop of oil from any drill you start planning today. And studies suggest that it will be 2020 before there is enough significant production to reduce what we have to buy.





If we spend those same 12 years and billions of dollars on alternate energy sources we could reduce the need for oil rather than try to find more oil to use.Why are politicians so zealous about drilling for oil in Alaska? Would it really affect gas prices?
So the drop from $4 a gallon at the pump to the eventual $2 a gallon at the pump (when the gas price catches up to the current oil price, due to the lag) was because America's demand went down 10% for 3 months. The Alaska drilling would feed 5% of America's demand for decades. Simple math tells us it would have an affect.





The environmental impact is putting drilling sites in an area smaller than a decent sized airport. The pipes already exist, it would just be the drilling locations that need to be completed.
the more we produce the less we need to buy from someone else...you can't listen to gore or pelosi about the environmental costs
I wonder about this and off shore. They have so many leases on land they havn't even exploited yet. Makes ya wonder.