CFP: It’s hard to believe it took more than 30 years to get Congress to approve drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska – not only because Republicans had control of Congress and the White House during the Bush years and could have done it then, but also because the arguments against it are so transparently absurd.
Democrats’ insistence that delicate ecosystems would be thrown out of whack by a tiny postage stamp of oil exporation on thousands of square miles of land never made any sense. People pictured unfortunate caribou getting doused with gushers of crude, but the reality is nothing like that an never has been.
Now comes Steve Meyer, a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and a well-known Alaska outdoorsman who has always reflexively opposed drilling in the ANWR. Now that it’s going to happen, Meyer takes a fresh look at the issue and admits there is really no serious reason to object:
Having struggled with this for a long time, the answer to my torment isn’t pretty. My objection to the exploration of ANWR comes from the selfish perspective of “I got mine and I don’t care if you get yours.” I am not a young person struggling to put milk and cereal on the table for my children. I don’t have to dream about having a nice place to live or a decent vehicle to drive, or being able to afford to visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I have those things.
In a perfect world, there would be no need to develop ANWR or any of the other semi-wild places targeted for such things. But the demand for energy and mineral resources is ever-growing. While we argue the merits of it all, and lament the lack of alternate energy sources, we do little to curtail that demand.
Fossil fuel is sort of like buying meat at the store: it’s easy to forget where it comes from. Walking through the aisles of plastic that pass for consumer goods on your way to pick up those organic vegetables, most of us never consider that it took resources mined from the earth to make most of it, and it didn’t arrive by horse-drawn cart. We all share the responsibility.
I’ve been there. Been on drilling rigs bordering ANWR. Drilled productive wells. There is no better place in North America for a world class oilfield than ANWR. Drill baby, drill!
That’s a heck of a picture. If it’s real, I would say late October, early November at the latest.
I’m good with the drilling but I do want close inspection and careful scrutiny of their work at all times.
Accidents from corner cutting and sloppy work can have disastrous results. Just recall the BP mess in the gulf and any number of other screw-ups from oil and nuclear usage.
I remember reading that the warmth around the exposed oil pipelines have actually helped increase wildlife numbers.
Tom,
And the pipe line itself which we heard was going to be so scary and disruptive gives shade where there are no trees so that the wildlife actually benefit from that, too.
@Tom and Gracis, I love this stuff, the engineering that goes into a tundra pipeline is amazing.
The oil has to be heated to go through the tube, the permafrost has to be maintained to keep the pipelines structural integrity.
Who remembers a slide rule?
Joe6 we’ve both been there and know the environmental restrictions imposed on drilling and production. Not a stretch to say, the cleanest oilfield in the world, because it has to be.