With the anxiety over high fuel prices hardly abating even as gasoline prices begin to fall, it takes courage to defend fact and environmental priorities before an expectant electorate. For that, Maine’s Sen. Olympia Snowe deserves applause.

Sen. Snowe, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, recently voted against a revenue projection that included money from drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Currently, there is no oil drilling in that refuge. But oil companies want to tap reserves of fossil fuel there, and the Senate Budget Committee included money from granting future drilling rights there in its budget revenue proposal.

The inclusion is a transparent double-back-door attempt by oil companies to get those rights. The companies can claim that tapping into oil reserves in the refuge will both decrease domestic fuel oil prices and decrease our reliance on foreign oil supplies. Also, the companies can claim that doing so further enriches the federal treasury — either to further reduce the much-ballyhooed federal gasoline tax or be put to other tax-reducing uses.

Of course, were it not for the sharp increase in fuel prices over recent months, talk of drilling for oil in pristine wilderness preserves would transcend heresy. And, not surprisingly, it’s still heresy, even if it’s not immediately unpopular.

If drilling were to begin today — which it cannot — it would be months, at best, before those supplies would affect U.S. supplies or gas pump prices. Indications are that fuel prices will stabilize within the coming few months.

Drilling in the preserve to drop fuel prices also presumes that enough oil could be drawn to seriously lessen demand for OPEC oil. That is unlikely. To produce a significant amount of oil would mean degrading the preserve significantly.

None of which even gets to the central problem behind oil price insanity: The only way Americans can ensure they don’t fall victim to oil barons is to lessen their dependence on oil.

That means engaging in energy conservation and, especially in the Northeast, broadening the number of fuel choices. It might even mean creating regional oil reserves for use during these short periods of high prices.

We don’t need to destroy national lands in order to feed our short-term petroleum penury. We do need to be realistic about what really causes our problem and how we can actually fix it.

Sen. Snowe did so. Her colleagues should be urged to follow.