Yes, I have. In fact I have seen a lot of the information before, as I haved lived in Alaska for 20 years, and worked in Prudhoe for 8 years. We go through this stuff all the time, and yet despite the exceptional track record of the Prudhoe field, the numbers never seem to change on the environmental side.
When they built Prudhoe there was no documentation as to what would happen, because it had never happened before. Now that they have decades of data behind them, the story remains the same from the environmental side. "Oh My God, it will ruin everything." Agreed, there have been two major problems resulting from the field. A rather large spill in Valdez, from which Prince William Sound still suffers. And yet another just north of my home where a bullet or two punched through the pipe and sprayed 285,000 gallons of crude oil across the tundra. It really is amazing just how far oil under pressure can shoot out of a hole less than a half inch in diameter. Terrible things both of them, yet unrelated to any drilling program. Both the direct result of alcohol, which causes far too many problems in the world in which we live in.
That said, in the beginning of this conversation I thought we had basically agreed that both sides of this agrument tend to provide misleading figures and examples. I believe the example was the expected jobs creation. So let me take it another step for you, lets say it takes ten times the amount of land (a total 0f 20,000 acres) to do the job up here in Alaska. Which is still a mere pittance of the 1.9 million acres in the reserve alone. Let's also inflate the figure for your state by the same amount, so now we are dealing with a total of 270 acres. Throw in whatever manning figures you want because I hadn't mentioned them. I think the figure for Alaska was 75,000; divide it by ten. So now we will create 7,500 jobs to develop the oil fields in both of our states.
Based on the questions I asked in the previous post, would you be for the development of the field? Remember, government paid for, no taxes, a check for everyone every year and all of the bragging rights about how you live in a state that pays you to live there. A yes or no will suffice, but please tell if you think the federal government should make the final decision and why.
Am I being too strict, posing unrealistic standards of area limitations, limited impact, and no other options? Please answer to yourself before you read on. Those are the same standards that supporters are promoting to sell their argument. “Impact will be limited to 2,000 acres” and “drilling is essential to provide jobs, security, and economic benefit to all of the U.S.” And that gets back to why I originally posted here: if drilling supporters must resort to misleading the public and politicians, their argument is pretty weak.