[tolbiny]

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In other words, it's fine for me to make a giant assumption for the sake of argument that "state ownership and private ownership is largely indistinguishable", but for you to concede that a corporation would probably have drilled in ANWR by now is an impossible counterfactual.

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Its counterfactual because the businessmen are not lobbying to BUY ANWR, but are lobbying to lease a small portion of it. When they are done drilling the land that is left is still under ownership of the US government. Of course they want to drill on someone else's property, but that doesn't mean that the way they would treat another's land is the same as they would treat their own land.

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Since that point, and especially since 1950, I submit that the American government has actually managed the environment pretty well.

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What's your standard (and background?). Most people don't have a clue about the disturbing nature of government property in many places. Atomic bomb tests are ignored (I mean, does anyone want to live in the desert? not counting phoenix and vegas of course). I have responded here a couple of times to Iron's similar claims about the government not being so bad at cleanup with references to Paducah Kentucky, where the remediation company I used to work for had a project delayed by 6 months while they found a site that was sufficiently CLEAN enough for us to run a pilot test. The site was so damn fouled up that the majority of it was inaccessible for a company that specialized in cleaning industrial waste (the wells drilled there were 2-3x deeper than any other they had drilled before and they went through carbon chambers faster than on any other site). Second on the list of disgusting places was a government owned landfill in colorado, third a military base in WA. This is a common theme in remediation work, government sites are the largest and dirtiest.