No Arctic drilling

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 4/10/02 | Editorial staff

[Homer_J_Simpson]

IT'S A HARMFUL illusion to think that tapping an Alaskan wildlife refuge will help this country's energy woes. The oil remains far away, costly to extract and limited in quantity. Drilling will be destructive to a unique and fragile region.

[A Navy Vet]

"Another problem is the fact that it will probably be 10 years before we see any oil, so it doesn't matter how fast we drill."

That's a talking point being circulated by the left. Fox News had a oil industry bigwig on today and said it would take about (2) years to start pumping. It's not as if there's no infrastructure already in place once the pipeline is extended to ANWR.

[rohry]

I don't see how ruining one of the very last pristine areas of wilderness for 6months of oil, will benifit most Americans 10years from now.

Have you been there? It's a barren Arctic plain! People like you probably consider the Sahara Desert to be a "pristine area of wilderness."

[zoyd]

I don't see how ruining one of the very last pristine areas of wilderness for 6months of oil, will benifit most Americans 10years from now. Don't you think if in the next 10 years we dedicate those funds to developing new fuel technologies we might be alittle better off, and finally severing our lifeline ties from the MiddleEast might be a plus.

Get off the pipe. And I'm not talking about the Alaskan Pipeline. 6 months of oil? Uh, yeah. 10 years from now? Only because of government red tape from enviros like yourself. Cut the red tape, we'd be drilling in months.

As for alternative fuels, well, enlighten us. We've heard about this since the early '70s... the fact is, 'alternative' energy sources are polluting, too. Electric cars? Well, electricity needs to be generated somewhere before it gets in your car... like a good old polluting power plant.

Instead of putting the cart before the horse, and calling for alternative sources to end our dependency on the Middle East, why not develop our own DIRECT, CURRENT alternative to dependency on the Middle East -- namely, our own oil reserves?

And if it's only 80 years of oil left, then you'll be a happy camper in your retirement home, knowing all that evil oil is gone.

[Zonitics]

You really made two arguments that need addressing. The first is that opening ANWR to drilling should be avoided because it will only enrich the oil men. That argument is just plain silly. Refusing to open ANWR enriches those who do not refuse to develop their reserves - i.e. the Saudis, the Russians, the Norwegians, the Mexicans, the Iraquis, etc.... Should we hurt our own oilmen in order to enrich the oilmen in other countries? If you want direct benefits from ANWR then buy the cheaper gas and invest in a U.S. oil company. Otherwise, quit your whining about others who are willing to invest, risk and work so that you can buy gas for under two dollars a gallon.

The second argument is that we'd be better off pursuing alternative energy sources. Here's a newsflash for you - we have. The reason that those sources haven't panned out is because the technological advancements in the petroleum industry kept the cost of oil cheap relative to the costs of the alternative energy sources.

Thirty years ago they said that the worlds oil reserves would be depleted by the turn of the century. Today we have more proven reserves than we did 20 years ago. How? Simple - technology constantly improves on our methods for discovering and extracting oil. Expected developments in extracting oil from shale alone could double proven reserves within the next 10 years.

Twenty years ago experts predicted that solar power would be price competitive with other forms of energy. In a sense they were right - the cost of solar power per killowat hour has dropped dramatically. The second part of their predictions was wrong. In order to predict that solar power would be price competitive, the experts assumed massive increases in the cost of fossil fuels. They were simply wrong - the cost of fossil fuels today are cheaper in real dollars than they were in the 1970s.

As long as oil and other fossil fuels continue to be the most efficient and inexpensive source of fuel we should and will continue to exploit it. When they becomes too costly to extract, we will naturally, and through market forces, develop alternatives. To try and force the market to accept alternatives now when they are not needed will hurt the economy and will ultimately fail.

[SGCOS]

...Living in Orange County, California, when I was a kid I could see probably 45-50 oil wells within 3 or 4 miles of my house. Somehow we managed to survive. Somehow, people went about their business, birds flew, squirrels dug

I've never seen a squirrel dig. Did those squirrels glow at night?

&^)

[onedoug]

"...and finally severing our lifeline ties from the MiddleEast might be a plus."

Polluted contries to be sure. But not from oil.

[TomB]

We should look into developing new forms of fuel, because in 80 or so years this planet's gonna be tapped out. And if that doesn't concern you, then think on our current Meast prediciment.

80 years? By who's estimate? Paul Ehrlich?

Perhaps you mean there are 80 years of KNOWN RESERVES. Of course, there were 80 years of known reserves 80 years ago.

[KC Burke]

Why should some big oil buddies of Bush get rich, and Alaska suffers.

It appears you are assigning a negative motive...care to back it up with facts?

Conservation is a great conservative principle. It has been perverted by leftist, politically motivated -- anti-human, Eco-envirnmentalism. No conservative turns away from conservationist discoveries in alternative fuels and energy uses. When they make economic sense, they rally to them. When they are politically correct government planning, they shun them for the falures they will become (say Jimmy Carter three times, under your breath).

Conservatives merely want the nation to control its energy destiny, not external forces. Envirnmentalists seem to want an externally driven, unavoidable, energy train wreck simply to help their anti-human development agenda. Which side are you on in that choice?

With all the prudent (another conservative virtue) controls and concerns, drill the ANWR areas the local inhabitants (not the outside tribe that got left out and is siding with enviro-whackos to get a piece of the pie) want to develope. Do it sensibly and take the bounty for our nation's people

[CyberCowboy777]

William F. Buckley Jr. on NRO

Don’t Book to ANWR
A devastating picture, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg.

July 24, 2001 12:50 p.m.

 

Good, honest, fullthroated indignation is nice to come on every now and then, and here is a sample. The provocation was by President Jimmy Carter, writing in the New York Times. He was pleading against any oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR). What he said was, "The simple fact is, drilling is inherently incompatible with wilderness. The roar alone — of road building, trucks, drilling, and generators — would pollute the wild music of the Arctic, and be as out of place there as it would be in the heart of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon."

That really did it for Jonah Goldberg, who had recently returned from the area in Alaska about which Mr. Carter was being poetic. "This sort of distortion," he writes in the current issue of National Review (and references in the Goldberg File), "is rampant . . . Never mind that all of that harmless noise pollution would occur in pitch darkness, drowned out by a 120-degree-below-zero wind chill. Even Jimmy Carter should know that music is like trees falling in the forest: It's only music if there's somebody there to hear it."

It is a devastating picture that Mr. Goldberg brings back from his trip. The sum of his case is that prospective oil drilling in Alaska could be done without any damage to live sensibilities. What are the reasons for the offensive against it? Let him tell it: "There's a simple explanation and a complicated one. The simple one is that it could be bad for the Porcupine River caribou herd . . . The more complicated explanation is that this is all a convenient and bogus cover for the simple fact that Americans generally — and environmentalists like [Ted] Turner specifically — are more than a little daft when it comes to ANWR."

Goldberg begins his informative dispatch with some graphic figures. The oil development on the North Slope dots a huge area, roughly the size of Minnesota. But the work is done on a comparatively tiny archipelago of "parking-lot-sized islands of human activity in a boundless ocean of tundra."

To get a perspective: Alaska has a population about the size of the nation's capital. But you could squeeze California into Alaska almost four times. Those who fear that Alaska is neglected in the matter of federal wildlife preservation are reminded that 60 percent of the official wilderness areas of the United States are in Alaska. ANWR is way over on the northeastern side of the state, about the size of South Carolina. What the oil industry is asking for is access to 2,000 acres, an area no bigger than Dulles Airport. "This footprint would be 50 times smaller than the Montana ranch owned by Ted Turner, who helps bankroll efforts to keep ANWR off-limits."

Goldberg makes a shrewd point when he reminds us that life can be hypothetically grand, but in order to make the sentient appreciation of it real, you need to experience the beauty. I can speak of having experienced the beauty of the South Pole, but it helped, when I did that, that it was midsummer, that a large warm igloo waited for us with food and wine, and that the naval airplane that brought us there kept its engines running, lest they freeze shut while we lunched.

What you have in the ANWAR part of the world is not just beautiful mountains, but five-months' blackness in winter, and five months' perpetual sunshine in summer, when the melted ice has produced puddles in which the enemy breeds. "The water in an old tire can breed thousands of mosquitoes; a puddle in a junkyard, millions. ANWR is the Great Kingdom of the Mosquitoes." We are not talking about mosquitoes as mere nuisances. "On a bad day, according to the villagers in nearby Nuisquit, you can't open your mouth for fear of inhaling the mosquitoes."

Yes, there certainly is wildlife, though not even wolf packs can co-exist for very long with the mosquitoes. "Grizzly bears, like caribou, aren't frightened by oil exploration. They consider Deadhorse the Paris or New York of the North Slope; they come in to see the sights, perhaps grab a little dinner, even to catch a show. Everyone has a bear story; the owner of an air-charter service recounts to me how she came out of her office one day to find three bears sitting, expectantly, atop her car, as if she were late for the car pool."

Ah, the ideologization of nature. The Prudhoe Bay drilling has been done with the most fastidious attention to derivative effects. There is no hunting, not even fishing, tolerated. "I knew a guy who got fired for throwing a rock at a fox," one exasperated former ranger is quoted as saying. Speaking of Arctic foxes, most of them are rabid. The satisfaction taken by those who swear by the blessed virginity of ANWR is felt mostly by Americans who have not been deflowered by life there.

[KnowYourEnemy]

Look all I'm saying (speaking from my own "independent" wing) is that I won't personally benefit from hurting Alaskan wilderness. And that our focus on oil, is the very thing that is about to lead us into another WorldWar.

We shoud develop new technologies. I also believe these gas driven power generators are extremely detrimental, and we should build more nuclear plants, which are much cleaner, and cost effective.

[rohry]

Would someone please tell me how they know it is only enough for 30 years?

I was refering to 30 (or more) years of lies from the left declaring that we are running out of oil. The amount of oil in ANWAR is not known for certain but optomistic forecasts speculate that it is one of the biggest oil fields ever discovered in North America.

[SunTzuWu]

Why would you oppose removing the underground oil that contaminates this "pristine" environment?

[backhoe]

because in 80 or so years this planet's gonna be tapped out

Not all agree:

The world has more oil not less

The Origin of Methane (and Oil) in the Crust of the Earth
Thomas Gold
U.S.G.S. Professional Paper 1570, The Future of Energy Gases, 1993

PETROLEUM RESERVES EVALUATED WITH MODERN PETROLEUM SCIENCE

Another Washington Post article here

[CyberCowboy777]

Get some fact before you mouth off here!

Goldberg File

Big Oil, Caribou, and Greed
The debate over ANWR.

July 20, 2001 4:00 p.m.

 

had a long talk with Poppa Goldberg last night. Poppa G (no relation to Kenny) knows more about good column-writing than the Pope knows about midget basketball and fly-fishing, put together. But I guess that's not saying much. How about: My dad knows more about this stuff than Gandhi knew about rice cakes and non-binding clothes.

Anyway, Poppa G says my columns are getting a bit too formulaic: a joke in the beginning, some overly wordy serious stuff, then more jokes, and a smart-ass finish. Hey, when you think about it, that's a pretty apt description of the Clinton years.

So, starting Monday, we'll try to start mixing up the formula around here. But today, I have something very serious to talk to you about: Simple, Chronic Comsotosis — my word for bad doggy breath. No, that's not right.

Actually, what I want to talk to you about is my expense account. As very close readers of this column know, you get a severe headache when you sit too close to the computer screen. But they also know that I recently went to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I hung out with folks who know how to fix their own cars and have totally legitimate reasons to carry knives on their belts. I also got to see what Joe Lieberman called "one of the most beautiful, pristine places that the good Lord has created on Earth" and "one of God's most awesome creations."

This is a form of divine slander, like saying Ghostbusters II was some of Bill Murray's best work; it's unfair both to God and to the cooler stuff in the Almighty's oeuvre. But such declarations are also a con. When you watch the evening-news programs on ANWR, most of the time you see mountains and beautiful rivers and lakes and all that. But that's not where they want to drill for oil. In fact, they can't drill for oil in those places for two very straightforward reasons. First, there's no oil there. Second, it's against the law.

In fact, the only spot where it's legal to drill for oil is on what's called the coastal plain of ANWR, the snippet on the northern coast of the Refuge. You rarely see pictures of the coastal plain, because it's not what TV producers call a "beauty shot" (I know this hyper-technical TV lingo from my years as a producer). So, they show mountains and Disney animals and crystal-clear running water and say, "This is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the evil greasy snout-nosed Republicans want to gouge the planet for a thimbleful of oil."

But that's only true in the sense it's not an outright lie. Yes, the drilling would be in ANWR, but it wouldn't be where the beauty shots are. It's like doing an on-location report on New York City's urban blight and crime, but broadcasting from a café in Rockefeller Center. The coastal plain is, in fact, a vast tract of peat bog and mud puddles (sounds like a crime fighting duo: "Tune in this fall to see Pete Bog and his fast-talking streetwise sidekick Mudd Puddles, tackle evildoers. Tuesdays at 9.").

The coastal plain is a breeding ground for all sorts of awful flying critters. There are trillions of mosquitoes. There are these creatures called warble flies and nosebots, two bumblebee-like flies that cause the caribou unrelenting grief. I could swear I even saw Alan Dershowitz whiz past my ear.

Sure, it's possible to think this spot is beautiful. People find all sorts of things beautiful these days. In fact, a man sold a can of his own excrement at an auction for tens of thousands of dollars a few years back. If that's art, hell, then the coastal plain is Shangri-frickin'-La.

But the truth is that the beauty of the coastal plain isn't really in the eye of the beholder, it's in the imagination of the angst-ridden liberals who have never beheld the thing and never will. Pay attention to the debate over ANWR and a single word will come up more than any other (discounting definite articles like "a" and "the," which come up a lot in pretty much every debate). That word is "pristine."

I understand the appeal of pristineness; the idea that a place or a thing is precisely as God made it can be very compelling. But the key point is that it's an idea. There's nothing inherently beautiful about pristineness. But when I listen to opponents of oil exploration in ANWR I get the distinct impression that what they really mean isn't so much that ANWR is beautiful in itself, but that humans are ugly. In fact, I bet if you asked someone from Greenpeace if there were any place in the world that is devoid of humans and also ugly, they wouldn't be able to name one.

This is why there is no compromising on the anti side of this argument. The oil industry has made huge strides in oil exploration in the last few decades. The oil under the coastal plain could literally be extracted during the dead of winter — when it's night for 58 straight days and no caribou would be dumb enough to come within 500 miles of the Arctic Ocean — and all that would be left come spring would be a couple of Portosan-sized boxes (which the caribou would probably climb onto to catch a better wind and avoid the bugs that breed in their nostrils — I am not kidding).

But the environmentalists refuse to accept any concessions from the industry, because you can't be a little bit pregnant and you can't be a little bit pristine. It's like ANWR is a new car, and the second you drive it off the lot by poking a teeny-tiny hole in the ground, it's "used." The idea is ruined, even though the idea was false all along. The coastal plain isn't pristine — the Inupiat Eskimos, who support drilling in their homeland, have been offing the caribou up there for centuries.

What really drove home for me how much arbitrary abstraction is involved on the anti side of this debate were my efforts to get to ANWR in the first place. The tour I signed up for didn't bring me to ANWR. It brought me to the Alpine oil facility run by Phillips Petroleum in Prudhoe Bay, a couple of hundred miles from ANWR. At Alpine, by the way, the caribou are thriving despite twenty years of oil extraction with machinery far clunkier than the stuff that would be used in ANWR.

The problem for me was that I couldn't go all the way up to the top shelf of the planet to write an article about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge-without actually going there. The roughnecks and engineers thought I was a moron for insisting on seeing an area that looks exactly like the area around Prudhoe.

"Just look out the window. That's what ANWR looks like."

It didn't matter. I had to go because of a totally abstract journalistic convention that dictated that I go. So, I hired a small charter plane (which came with an emergency kit in the off chance that I got stuck out in the bush in bear country). We flew over to ANWR and guess what? Another endless ocean of puddles and tundra.

Now, here's the kicker. That plane was really expensive. And so was my hotel. In fact, the whole trip cost a lot more than we planned and the greedy oil companies aren't covering my freight. Which brings me back to the real issue: my expense account. We all know that copper wire was invented when someone tried to pry an extra penny out of the NR home office. Well, when the NR suits see my expenses it's gonna take the jaws of life to get full reimbursement.

That's where you come in. The full story of my trip to ANWR will not be posted on National Review Online — at all, ever. Cover stories of National Review OnDeadTree do not get posted on National Review Online. This is a matter of policy set by forces far more powerful than me; forces of bottomless, dark, unfathomable, nigh-upon-Stygian depth; forces which have been rumored to rhyme with Pitch Dowry.

Still, if you do not subscribe to NRODT, and you want to read the full, definitive story, you must purchase the magazine. Moreover, the rush to get a copy of this magazine must be so huge, so massive so as to create a jet stream that virtually snatches my reimbursement check out of the iron claws of the NR accounting office. Newsstands should be buried in confetti from the periodical-shredding dogfights over the last copy of the August 9 issue of National Review. Bookstore coffee houses should drown in a sea of spilt lattes.

For if there is not such a groundswell, if the ad revenues and newsstand sales do not surge like Alec Baldwin's skull after an overdose of Viagra, then there's no way the home office will ever approve my expense report and they will never send me anywhere else again. And if I cannot travel the globe as a peripatetic scribe in pursuit of truth and reimbursed alcohol consumption, then the hotel and airport bars which form the backbone of the American, nay, the global economy will shudder from my absence.
It's all riding on you.

Sorry, Dad.

[ChadGore]

http://users.wi.net/~johnh/drill.JPG

[what's up]

and Alaska suffers

HAHA!! Alaskans are some of the most ardent advocates for drilling. It will improve their way of life and have minimal adverse effect on the environment.

Typical of lefties to mourn over a wilderness that they and few others will never even visit and at the same time hold back local citizens from improving their way of life.

[CoolPapaBoze]

I don't suppose you have any facts to support any of your points, do you?

The idea that this is some sort of pristine and scenic area is total crap. Ask anyone that lives in Alaska or that has been there. It's a mosquito infested swamp that is hundres of miles from anything.

If you're going to make idiotic assertions, do it somewhere else, please.

[Cyber Liberty]

Wow! Your second day here, and you're already one of the Brightest Lights on FR!

[Zathras]

Funny, San Francisco didn't seem too worried when they burned down a large portion of the Redwood forest to re-build SF after the earthquake.