thoughtmechanics

Senate Republicans, who seem to only be able to see things in black & white (and of course, green), are trying to sell your soul to the devil. The price? One hundred dollars.

Every American taxpayer would get a $100 rebate check to offset the pain of higher pump prices for gasoline, under an amendment Senate Republicans hope to bring to a vote Thursday. However, the GOP energy package may face tough sledding because it also includes a controversial proposal to open part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration, which most Democrats and some moderate Republicans oppose.

Curious about effects of drilling for oil in a national wildlife refuge, I emailed a good friend of mine Scott Jones, an environmental expert, and asked the following. “Isn’t it better to open up drilling in our wildlife refuge than to continue to be dependant on foreign sources of oil?”

His answer is what follows.

–

Hey Sonny.

No, it’s not. Continuing to exploit “new” sources of oil isn’t the path we should be heading down, at all. First, it simply continues our addiction on oil–and since we don’t have a hell of a lot of the oil left in the world, it also continues our reliance on foreign supplies. Think of it like this: if you’re a meth addict who usually buys the stuff from a dealer, deciding to make your own for a week isn’t going to cure your addiction…it just postpones the inevitable sale another week (and likely ensures a larger future purchase, as your usage might increase). Would it decrease prices? Who knows…it would simply allow demand to continue to rise, which according to the law of supply and demand, would simply allow prices to continue to climb over time. We shouldn’t be doing anything right now that continues our addiction–we should only be taking steps to limit it. Investing a bunch of money into oil drilling infrastructure is a step in the wrong direction–we could easily save the amount of oil we’d get from ANWR by just making our vehicles get a few more miles to the gallon–something imminently doable that would continue to produce benefits long after the 6 months of ANWR oil dried up.

The other issue with drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is that we’d only get a small drop of oil–less than 6 months worth under our current usage–and the spigot wouldn’t even turn on for at minimum 10 years. And, with the increased permafrost melt resulting from global warming, construction might take longer. This is akin to treating a decapitation with a band-aid–it’s just not going to work.

Of course, as I wrote last year on TM, drilling in the Arctic isn’t really about oil to begin with. In fact, conservative strategists have said (sorry, I don’t have the quote handy, but it’s something like this) that “if we can can drill in ANWR, we can drill anywhere…even Yellowstone.” See, nobody really thinks that the oil will help us in any meaningful way. This is really about redefining what activities can occur on protected public lands. Conservatives hate that the government owns land that it manages for all of us–they of course, think that business should be able to exploit these places instead. It’s part of the broader strategy to rid the federal government of “public” lands–selling off national parks to companies to manage as vacation resorts, allowing oil/gas drilling in special places like national monuments, attempting to privatize national forests, or the current plan of selling national forests to help pay for the debt and rural education. Top conservatives believe that drilling in ANWR will be the death of the environmental movement (it won’t be, of course).

Now sure, there are some other motives–particularly for the folks up in Alaska, who believe that the federal government should let them do whatever they want on their own land. Drilling in ANWR would bring them jobs and tax revenue, of course. But the problem is that we’re not talking about Alaskan land, we’re talking about federal public land–land that you or I have the same right to as any Alaskan. It was all of our tax dollars that purchased the state from Russia, all of our tax dollars that manage it, and all of our right to maintain it as the pristine landscape it was set aside to be. This is an important point to remember. It’s a national treasure that belongs to all of us, our kids, and our future grand-kids. Arizona can’t close off the Grand Canyon to nonresidents or decide to dam the Colorado River and turn it into a lake (oh wait, the Sierra Club already killed that bill decades ago…it’s how we lost our 501c3 tax status), because it is part of the national heritage and you have as much right to it as I do.

As you can see, I haven’t even gotten to the ecological (drilling impact, global warming, etc) reasons why we shouldn’t drill for oil. There are compelling arguments here too, but I’m a bit out of time. The Republican proposal you mentioned sucks too, as does President Bush’s call for more refinery capacity (hint–oil companies don’t want any more refineries).

Anyway, hope that helps explain it a bit.

Scott.
http://www.rscottjones.com/