alternative hippopotamus

3/5/2005

Elephant #3: We Have the Technology

Recently I received this in email from a prominent political blogger. It's pretty close to what I've heard from a number of well-meaning liberals, so it's worth-while to pick on him or her just a little:

Personally, I wish we could make a deal on ANWR. I'd be OK with allowing drilling if we got something nice in return, like an increase in CAFE standards, which would really make a difference in oil consumption.

Of course, if we had even a slight increase in CAFE standards (the number of miles per gallon that your car consumes), we wouldn't need to have this discussion in the first place. That's a discussion we'll have soon.

Implicit in this attitude is that our technology is advanced to the point where we can do this in an environmentally friendly way. Perhaps we can dress up the drilling rigs so they look like Santa's workshop. And we'll paint stripes on the pipelines so that they'll look like enormous candy canes. And we can dress the workers in elf costumes so it'll be just like the North Pole we imagined when we were kids. See, we're not destroying the environment, we're making it better.

We have the technology. We can rebuild it.

This is only a slight exaggeration of what actual people have said to me.

Here's the village in the 1002 Area, where the Kaktovik Inupiat live:

The Bush administration is working overtime to win the natives of this sleepy village over. You probably won't be shocked to know that they're doing it the old-fashioned way: bribery (Reuters)

Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling would raise an initial $2.4 billion in leasing fees, half of which would be shared with the state of Alaska, the Bush administration said in proposed fiscal 2006 budget documents released on Monday.

That's a lot of cash. And, it raises an interesting question. If the Bush administration is willing to invest this much of our money for drilling in ANWR, how come he can't invest the same amount in reducing consumption? Because if he did that, we wouldn't need to talk about destroying a Wilderness Refuge. We'll get to that question soon.

For now, I just want to give you an artist's conception of what the village above will look like in 2010 if we do as Bush wants us to do. Unfortunately, I'm not an artist. Ordinarily, I'd pass this off to my editorial assistant, Pavlov Chien, but he's not speaking to me. I ask him to do something, and he just shrugs his shoulders and says: "What does an Eco Drama Queen like myself know?"

So, instead, I'll just give you a picture of Prudhoe Bay, which is where the existing drilling is going on. As I understand it, the Area 1002 drilling would use similar technology.