ANWR is a great idea to get oil prices down. There's plenty of infrastructure in Alaska, and oil companies estimate two to three years before oil would be flowing (hopefully into pipelines and tankers and not out into the ocean.) Speculation works because everyone knows that all the oil produced will be sold. Plus, we have this idiotic system where oil speculators only have a 10% margin call, so investing $1,000,000 in capital allows you to control $10,000,000 in oil contracts. (For reference, the stock market as a whole has a 50% margin for most commodities.) If production is 110% of supply, then 10% of the options never get taken, speculators lose the cost of options on that 10%, and everyone becomes more cautious about bidding up prices.
It's important to realize though that more oil only moves the problem back in time. America alone could easily supply all its needs within 5 years through ANWR, off-shore areas currently off-limits to exploration, oil shale, oil sands, and continental drilling - the area from Texas up through North Dakota is loaded in oil. America has enough energy reserves to provide all our energy for the next fifty to eighty years, conservatively. But if we only move the problem back in time, then eventually the system will still crash. By then we'll have even more people and even more oil-based infrastructure. Even worse, by all current trends we'll have fewer energy companies, fewer companies overall, a less-free market, and more dependence on government. This means government will consume a much higher proportion of total resources than it does now, leaving less capital to develop new sources of energy.
I'm all for drilling in ANWR and off-shore, but unless we make major steps toward different energy sources we're just trading pain now for pain later. Even worse, the oil producing companies and nations now know we'll pay $140 a barrel if needed, which means we need enough additional capacity to prevent OPEC from simply lowering production to keep prices high. We need more oil now and a plethora of new energy sources to allow us to shift between them as market forces change.
