Today, my heart is heavy. By just two votes, we came up short in our effort to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to over 150 wildlife species.
I offer my heartfelt thanks to the thousands of you who joined with me and signed my petition to Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist, demonstrating our strong opposition to this disastrous policy.
In the end, over 90% of Senate Democrats voted to stop this madness -- we just didn't have the votes to overcome the Republican majority in the Senate.
But I want you to know that I won't give up in our fight to stop the drilling. And neither should you. I'm going to use every legislative tool at my disposal to reverse this vote and prevent this terrible policy from going into effect.
But we can do more -- today.
I'm planning to organize a consumer boycott of any oil company that decides to drill in this pristine Alaskan wilderness area. If, through our pocketbooks, we can convince these companies to do the right thing, we can still save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the destruction that would be wrought by the oil drilling rigs. I know lorax and many of you have already been talking about this -- and I think it's a great idea.
I've set up a petition form on my PAC for a Change website to make it easy to send an email to the CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch/Shell, and ChevronTexaco and tell them to stay out of ANWR. I hope you'll join me in this effort:
http://ga4.org/campaign/boycott
Then after you've signed the petition and emailed these 5 oil companies, I hope you'll invite everyone you know to join us.
http://ga4.org/campaign/boycott/forward
This battle is not over -- not by a long shot.
Thanks for all the work that you do -- and for all of the support you continue to give me. I can't do it without you.
In Friendship,
Barbara Boxer