For opponents of the drilling, including Vice President Al Gore, the issue is a zero-sum game: if the area is opened to development, a rare wilderness where many birds and animals bear their young would be lost.
The Interior Department estimated in February that there was a 75percentt chance of an oil spill larger than 1,000 gallons in the coming decades if the Arctic is opened to development.
The environmentalists are merely asking that the job of safeguarding the millions of acres that are open to development not be transferred to notoriously indifferent state agencies.
Matters for which there is no formal law, such as the resignation of office by a government, follow precedents (conventions) that are open to development or modification.
Mr. DeSario said, however, that if Cow Neck had been open to development, it is "large enough to create its own estate area with houses starting at $4 million on two-acre parcels".
Governments decide who is eligible for visas: how many cruise ships, airlines and trains can bring in visitors, how many hotels receive building permits, how many beaches are open to development, how many museums and concert halls are open, even how many farmers receive subsidies to raise food for the restaurants and cafes that tourists frequent.
"Any modifications would still have to comply with the restrictions that already govern engine development".Aimed at keeping costs down, these follow a formula that defines 92% of the engine as being open to development from the first season of the design to the second.
The Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, said: "At the Premier League we are open to developments that enhance the competition and it was clear from watching the World Cup in Brazil that vanishing spray benefitted referees, players, and all of those who watched the matches.
They added that, while it would be important for the new law to be ?open to developments in research,?
Speculative Cosmology, in particular, needs to be open to developments in the fundamental sciences, and so needs to be seen as always provisional and a posteriori.
