Okay, that’s a little more clear. As I said, I was a hands-on grunt, not the guy at the negotiating table.
And, in the interests of keeping this from becoming a Great Debate, a direct answer to the original post:
How much would exploration and drilling hurt the environment? Not much, but it depends on your definition of “hurt”. (And no, this isn’t an “is” definition question. 
Bear with me.)
As tisiphone said, bulldozer tracks would last a long time. However, the proposed exploration method involves only building and transporting in the wintertime, using pads and roads made of ice and snow. For the most part, with minor exceptions, nothing would ever touch the tundra other than a few square yards around the wellhead itself.
Yes, spills are a problem, no question. But there’s a great deal of equipment on hand, 24/7, to combat them. The oil-and-saltwater spill mentioned a few posts above? Today’s local newspaper mentioned that of 19,400 gallons spilled (which was 97% saltwater) within 24 hours they had collected 19,700 gallons of material, including ice and snow that had been melted into the spill puddle.
As for other nicities I glided over… well, as I said, I’m not a political animal so I’m ill-equipped to argue Range vs. Monument vs. BLM land. For other things I don’t have the raw numbers, or I can’t for the life of me remember if it’s Gw’ichin or Tlingit.
Why is Texas not a wasteland? Whoo… I’m not touchin’ that line with a ten-foot pole.
The bottom line is, at the risk of making this a Great Debate topic, as long as people keep demanding plastic products, cheap gasoline, disposable razors and shatterproof bottles for their Evian, the US must either provide it’s own oil or purchase it from foreign sources.
Yes, we need to develop alternate sources. Contrary to popular belief, many of the larger pertroleum companies also have R&D labs for alternate fuels. The myth of the so-called “200-mile-per-gallon” carburetor is just that, a myth. One has to have a pretty cynical and paranoiac view of “Big Oil” to think that if they had some secret technology- reliable fuel cells, cold fusion, long-lived lightweight batteries and so on- that they wouldn’t be rushing it to market as fast as possible.
The problem with alternative fuels is their inherent complexity. Gasoline and a gasoline reciprocating-piston engine is relatively simple, the fuel is stable, cheap, powerful, and a reasonable mass of it provides a reasonable range and efficiency.
It’s also been in development at one stage or another for well over 150 years.
Yes, we can make reliable, functional electric-only cars. But right now, even with between half and two-thirds of the car’s mass comprised of batteries, range is limited to under 100 miles, or a third that of a gasoline car that costs a third as much.
Those same batteries also lose upwards of 60% of their power in the cold. Where I live, it’s below freezing for six months out of the year. I’d have to charge the car three times just to do a day’s shopping and errands.
The hybrid gas-electrics are better still, though so new they still have bugs.
As for electrical generation… This past Earth Day I read that a windmill farm in California kills an average of 39 Golden Eagles a year.
Various environmentalists don’t want new coal-fired electrical plants, no oil-fired plants, and definitely no Nuclear plants. Nobody seems to mind natural-gas fired plants, but they refuse to allow exploration or drilling for the gas itself. No oil drilling is allowed so we can’t have stuff made of plastic and nobody wants any timber harvesting so we can’t have stuff made of wood or paper as well.
Okay, now I’m definitely ranting.