The Interior Secretary-designate of the new Bush Administration, Ms Gale Norton, appears to have convinced senators that she has changed her ultra-conservative spots.
Yesterday the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted 18-2 to send the nomination of the controversial former Colorado Attorney General to the floor of the Senate. She is likely to be confirmed fully within days. But Ms Norton's term is not likely to be untroubled. Environmental groups are bitterly opposed to her, the administration's deregulatory tendencies and its sympathies with landowners and those who want to log and drill in the US wildernesses, for which she is steward. Indeed, within hours of Mr Bush's inauguration, officials began a review of the last-ditch Clinton edicts, most notably his order protecting 58 million acres of federal land from new road-building and logging.
Mr Bush's spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, has promised that they will move quickly to grant oil drilling licences in Alaska. Senators yesterday gave their approval to four other Bush nominees, Ms Elaine Chao (Labour), Mr Noman Mineta (Transport), Mr Tommy Thompson (Health/Human Services), and Ms Christine Todd Whitman (Environment Protection Agency). However, Democrats succeeded in postponing a vote on Mr John Ashcroft for Attorney General until next week, although observers say he is likely to be ratified.
The ranking Democrat on the Energy Committee, Senator Jeffrey Bingaman, admitted that he "had serious reservations" about Ms Norton but had been reassured by her testimony on her "passionate conservationist" views and her repudiation of her previous opposition to the Endangered Species Act and of the idea of a "right to pollute".
Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon was one of the two Democrats to oppose her.
He said that although she "was no James Watt", a reference to the Reagan interior secretary who is a hate figure to greens, "is that enough"? Ms Norton would have wide discretion, he said, to dilute the country's environmental standards and he did not trust her record.
And Ms Norton, whose nomination is opposed by major environmental groups, including Republicans, because of her past support for development and exploration of public lands, was not backing away from the most controversial aspect of her brief. She insisted at the hearings that the oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge proposed by the incoming Bush administration should pose little risk to the environment of the 19 million-acre refuge. Furthermore, she noted, any exploration of the refuge could take place only with congressional approval.
She warned that exploitation of the oil from the reserve, estimated at up to 12 billion barrels of recoverable crude, was critical to meeting US energy requirements.
Ms Norton supports a major plank of the Bush Administration, its energy policy. Unresponsive to the demands of the rest of the world that the US should try to limit its petrol consumption to cope with current oil shortages, let alone global warming, Mr Bush insists that the US must try to become self-sufficient by finding new reserves of its own.
Critics point out that at best the new Alaskan fields are likely to produce 1.35 million barrels a day, less than the daily imports from Saudi, which in turn represents only 5 per cent of US supply.
The real problem, they say, is that with 4 per cent of the world's population, the US consumes 25 per cent of its oil, and its daily use of 20 million barrels is predicted on current trends to rise by a quarter in the next 20 years.
Drilling for oil in Alaska will not deal with the over-use problem.
Environmentalists and the local aboriginal people, the Vuntut Gwich'in, who depend on the vulnerable caribou to live, are bitterly opposed to the majority Alaskan support for the extension of such drilling.
Oil revenues will provide each Alaskan taxpayer with a $1,963 bonus this year alone and a tax-free regime for most that would be the envy of every PAYE worker.
