7 ms·

Don't Sell Out the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil Companies

171 points by howard941 8y ago

Simulacra 8y ago
ANWR, A place few people have ever set foot, let alone seen, including environmentalist from a distance. Meanwhile the state has an unemployment rate of about 7%, and a lot of people depend on the revenue from the sale of oil to live. I say drill. Alaska isn’t the place you’re going to see Amazon build a warehouse, at least let them have something.
- normal_man 8y ago
  Yeah you're right, the only value of vast swaths of untouched nature is to be looked at.
- cmurf 8y ago
  They have freedom of movement. Unlike quite a lot of people on earth.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other inhabitants, the humans should move. If my choice is between a polar bear or a town in Alaska, I'll pick the polar bear anytime and move the town. We don't need to turn every corner of the planet into a place serving our immediate human needs. In fact we've already done that to too many places and are ruining the planet for everyone while doing so. On top of that we shouldn't be drilling for oil anywhere. We likely have already turned the planet into a uninhabitable wasteland by burning too many fossil fuels. We need to have a hard cut on our fossil fuel dependence and not sorry it further.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    The choice isn’t between drilling oil in Alaska and everyone transitioning to alternative energy. It’s between drilling oil in Alaska and buying it from regimes that murder dissidents and sometimes deny basic rights to women.
    - petschge 8y ago
      You make the implicit assumption that there is no option of using less oil. And while that might be true this week, there is no reason why we can not use much less oil in a year or a decade.
      - philwelch 8y ago
        You can, and indeed should, do both. In fact, simultaneously reducing demand and increasing supply is what will hurt these regimes the most.
    - eropple 8y ago
      Why not use less oil?
      - philwelch 8y ago
        So what’s your plan to reduce oil consumption to the point of applying broad economic sanctions against every autocratic oil regime including Russia and Saudi Arabia, and how soon can you implement that? I guarantee you can implement it a lot faster if you replace that oil production from those regimes with added oil production from democratic oil-producing countries like the US and Canada.
        ajmurmann 8y ago
        Why limit ourselves to economic sanctions? The future of the entire planet is at stake. This is the equivalent of an all out military attack by a foreign power.
  - trimbo 8y ago
    > If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other inhabitants, the humans should move. The indigenous populations in the Arctic are often very poor. Who is going to pay for them to move to Ft. Lauderdale, or even as far as Juneau? House them, find them jobs, etc? "Just move" is a non-solution also offered up for pretty much every factory closing in the rust belt, coal miners in WV, etc. It vastly overestimates the mobility of many families, especially those near or in poverty. That said, Prudhoe Bay has double the national unemployment rate, so I don't buy the argument that drilling is a magical answer to unemployment. (And we should stop burning stuff for energy)
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Paying for people to move is a lot cheaper than climate change.
    - dougmwne 8y ago
      The reality is that the oil companies usually hire non-natives. They'll make big promises to the communities though before a project so that no one makes waves. Haven't yet heard of a case where they delivered the jobs to the native communities that were promised.
    - ajmurmann 8y ago
      Agreed! That's a huge, but somewhat separate problem. I'm more than happy to pay for UBI of it leads to happier people and a healthier planet in this case. I don't think there is a way around it if automation continues to improve.
- pastor_elm 8y ago
  All these people moved to Alaska because of oil and now they're addicted to it. Sad really. Hopefully an income tax will cause some sort of exodus. A smaller population can be sustained on tourism and fishing.
- dougmwne 8y ago
  Given that we're barreling towards environmental collapse, lowering Alaska's unemployment rate by a fraction of a percent or encouraging more lower 48 people to move there might not be our highest priority. High arctic industrial operations also contribute to albedo changes from soot settling on the ice. Intact ecosystems have value now and for generations to come. To destroy them because they're not overrun with tourists is incredibly anthropocentric.
Communitivity 8y ago
Everything is connected. The more we lose bird and insect species, the harder it will be on the flowers,grasses, and trees. The harder it is on those, the harder it is on use due to erosion and has CO2 scrubbing by the plants. We lost the last White Rhino last year, 3 bird species, and others. The extinction rate each of the last five years has been 1000 to 10000 times the normal rate. https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-02-extinct-animal-species-2018 https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-02-exti...
- 5040 8y ago
  Is there such a thing as the "normal extinction rate"?
  - tmountain 8y ago
    Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.
- tmountain 8y ago
  As a society, we've chosen to prioritize financial interests above all else; thereby, robbing future generations of the richness and majesty that makes the world a beautiful place. When propagandists successfully politicized environmental protection, they set us on a path that not only ensured the mass extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals, but also jeopardized the survival of our own species. No one has a full picture of what the impacts of the impending extinctions and climate events will be, but I believe characterizing them as an existential crisis for the human race is accurate. Money doesn't do much good when the food and water are poisoned, the air is toxic to breathe, and vast portions of the continents are under water. Unfortunately, we're not well adapted to dealing with slow moving threats such as these, so addressing the situation while there's still time seems dubious at best.
  - hanniabu 8y ago
lcfcjs2 8y ago
I've worked for an oil and gas company for a while now, and it's really shameful how much political action they expect their employees to take.
melling 8y ago
There's plenty of oil in the world. Why do we feel the need to go after every last drop in the United States? It'll still be there in 100 years, if we need it.
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  Why are we still doing for oil anyways?! We are about to kill everyone on the planet with our fossil fuel addiction.
  - magduf 8y ago
    Because we don't care. We want to drive our giant SUVs 2-3 hours a day so we can live in a McMansion in the exurbs, and we don't give a shit about what this is going to do to future generations. Furthermore, roughly half of Americans don't believe this is even a problem, and don't care about what any scientists tell them, because their religious leaders and favorite politicians tell them otherwise.
    - ajmurmann 8y ago
      Should we all have to be in agreement to finally take meaningful action? If we were in a space station with thin walls and some folks want to set up a shooting range for their own enjoyment we'd stop them by all means. We wouldn't care if those people believe in vacuum outside the space station or not. Might seem far fetched, but we are very much in the same situation.
      - hjek 8y ago
        > we'd stop them by all means Fully agree. This is not an issue where we just have to hope that one day someone in charge will fix it.
      - magduf 8y ago
        >If we were in a space station with thin walls and some folks want to set up a shooting range for their own enjoyment we'd stop them by all means. No, we wouldn't, nor should we. The reason is democracy: if the people in that space station have a democratic government, and more than half of them vote for leaders who promise them they can keep their shooting range, no matter how dangerous, well then everyone else just has to live with it. Hopefully, it's obvious here that democracy only really works when the citizens are smart enough to use it well. The problem is that, in many cases, they just aren't, which is what we're seeing now.
snowplay 8y ago
Please don't buy the hype. I'm going to guess that almost everyone would agree with preservation of environment and wildlife. But the drilling in northern Alaska is not what one may think. Drilling sites have small surface foot prints and reach out via horizontal drilling. Additionally, oil exploration on the north slope of Alaska has been going on since the 1960's with a remarkably good health, safety, and environmental responsibility record. Look at their record and what they've been doing. It may be a rare case, but Alaska's north slope environment has not been harmed by exploratory drilling sites.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  The actual drilling is not the real issue. The drills are indeed a negligible footprint. But every drilling site has a road. Every road has bridges. Then, should oil be pumped, pipelines and other support infrastructure. Surrounding all of this is then the local risk of spills, and the non-local implications of burning yet more oil. So to stop all that nasty stuff later, we need to stop the preliminary drilling today. Canada is struggling with abandoned oil infrastructure, tar sand developments that companies do not want to clean up. (There was a recent supreme court case about this.) For all the pre-planning and taxation, everyone knows that some day in the future it will be the government saddled with cleanup costs.
  - marvindanig 8y ago
    I don't know why you're being downvoted. I used to work in an oil and gas firm earlier. And I agree with everything that you have just said.
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    I don't know why this is being downvoted. Agree or disagree, it's a reasonable contribution to the conversation. To me, downvotes are for bad-faith arguments, axe-grinding, comments that raise issues answered in TFA, and other things that worsen the quality of conversation.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
appleiigs 8y ago
I work for oil & gas in the Canadian oil sands. If you want to us to stop drilling and mining, you should stop demanding that we do it. It’s no different than ivory from Africa or drugs from South America. In Canada we pay $1.20 per litre of gasoline ($4.50 per gallon) - love to see the US try that.
- hjek 8y ago
  Yes, the demand for oil is a huge problem, and we should all do our best to stop driving and flying all the time. That said, I'd encourage you, if it's something that's economically possible for you, to consider finding work elsewhere. Sticking to your analogy, the poacher who shoots the elephants is not entirely innocent either. I used to work for a sketchy company, so I also recognise that this is not an easy decision to make. I used to think If I don't do it, somebody else will.
  - appleiigs 8y ago
    No, I'm not going to be demonized for producing something the entire world needs. How many on HN and Silicon Valley can say the same?
kjell 8y ago
I'll just leave this here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion
- hjek 8y ago
  I'll just leave this here as well: https://www.gorillatough.com/product/gorilla-super-glue/ https://www.gorillatough.com/product/gorilla-super-glue/
amalcon 8y ago
I went to Alaska last January. It's like no place else I've ever been. The folks there both really care about the environment and really care about the oil industry. It is a question of much debate there. It's an interesting case study. The state had a huge economic boom about 30 years ago as a result of the Alyeska pipeline. Lots of people (in relative terms, Alaska is not and will never be densely populated) moved there to take advantage. Basically everyone else is there because it has been their home for generations, or because they moved there for the nature aspect. Economic booms don't last forever. Now you have people who moved there for money (which is gone) consistently at odds with people who are there for other reasons. The former want to bring back the boom times, and will pretty much vote for anyone who says they can do that. The latter just want to move on with their lives and protect what has not already been damaged.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
I've always found it amusing that the Scandinavian countries lauded for being socialist utopias with the highest quality of life do so by drilling like Arabian princes, yet you only hear complaining about exploitation in the red state of alaska which only produces 5% of the nation's crude and has a generally so-so quality of life.

171 points by howard941 8y ago

ANWR, A place few people have ever set foot, let alone seen, including environmentalist from a distance. Meanwhile the state has an unemployment rate of about 7%, and a lot of people depend on the revenue from the sale of oil to live. I say drill. Alaska isn’t the place you’re going to see Amazon build a warehouse, at least let them have something.

normal_man 8y ago
Yeah you're right, the only value of vast swaths of untouched nature is to be looked at.
cmurf 8y ago
They have freedom of movement. Unlike quite a lot of people on earth.
ajmurmann 8y ago
If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other inhabitants, the humans should move. If my choice is between a polar bear or a town in Alaska, I'll pick the polar bear anytime and move the town. We don't need to turn every corner of the planet into a place serving our immediate human needs. In fact we've already done that to too many places and are ruining the planet for everyone while doing so. On top of that we shouldn't be drilling for oil anywhere. We likely have already turned the planet into a uninhabitable wasteland by burning too many fossil fuels. We need to have a hard cut on our fossil fuel dependence and not sorry it further.
- philwelch 8y ago
  The choice isn’t between drilling oil in Alaska and everyone transitioning to alternative energy. It’s between drilling oil in Alaska and buying it from regimes that murder dissidents and sometimes deny basic rights to women.
  - petschge 8y ago
    You make the implicit assumption that there is no option of using less oil. And while that might be true this week, there is no reason why we can not use much less oil in a year or a decade.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      You can, and indeed should, do both. In fact, simultaneously reducing demand and increasing supply is what will hurt these regimes the most.
  - eropple 8y ago
    Why not use less oil?
    - philwelch 8y ago
      So what’s your plan to reduce oil consumption to the point of applying broad economic sanctions against every autocratic oil regime including Russia and Saudi Arabia, and how soon can you implement that? I guarantee you can implement it a lot faster if you replace that oil production from those regimes with added oil production from democratic oil-producing countries like the US and Canada.
      - ajmurmann 8y ago
        Why limit ourselves to economic sanctions? The future of the entire planet is at stake. This is the equivalent of an all out military attack by a foreign power.
- trimbo 8y ago
  > If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other inhabitants, the humans should move. The indigenous populations in the Arctic are often very poor. Who is going to pay for them to move to Ft. Lauderdale, or even as far as Juneau? House them, find them jobs, etc? "Just move" is a non-solution also offered up for pretty much every factory closing in the rust belt, coal miners in WV, etc. It vastly overestimates the mobility of many families, especially those near or in poverty. That said, Prudhoe Bay has double the national unemployment rate, so I don't buy the argument that drilling is a magical answer to unemployment. (And we should stop burning stuff for energy)
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Paying for people to move is a lot cheaper than climate change.
  - dougmwne 8y ago
    The reality is that the oil companies usually hire non-natives. They'll make big promises to the communities though before a project so that no one makes waves. Haven't yet heard of a case where they delivered the jobs to the native communities that were promised.
  - ajmurmann 8y ago
    Agreed! That's a huge, but somewhat separate problem. I'm more than happy to pay for UBI of it leads to happier people and a healthier planet in this case. I don't think there is a way around it if automation continues to improve.
pastor_elm 8y ago
All these people moved to Alaska because of oil and now they're addicted to it. Sad really. Hopefully an income tax will cause some sort of exodus. A smaller population can be sustained on tourism and fishing.
dougmwne 8y ago
Given that we're barreling towards environmental collapse, lowering Alaska's unemployment rate by a fraction of a percent or encouraging more lower 48 people to move there might not be our highest priority. High arctic industrial operations also contribute to albedo changes from soot settling on the ice. Intact ecosystems have value now and for generations to come. To destroy them because they're not overrun with tourists is incredibly anthropocentric.

Communitivity 8y ago

Everything is connected. The more we lose bird and insect species, the harder it will be on the flowers,grasses, and trees. The harder it is on those, the harder it is on use due to erosion and has CO2 scrubbing by the plants. We lost the last White Rhino last year, 3 bird species, and others. The extinction rate each of the last five years has been 1000 to 10000 times the normal rate. https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-02-extinct-animal-species-2018 https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-02-exti...

5040 8y ago
Is there such a thing as the "normal extinction rate"?
- tmountain 8y ago
  Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.
tmountain 8y ago
As a society, we've chosen to prioritize financial interests above all else; thereby, robbing future generations of the richness and majesty that makes the world a beautiful place. When propagandists successfully politicized environmental protection, they set us on a path that not only ensured the mass extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals, but also jeopardized the survival of our own species. No one has a full picture of what the impacts of the impending extinctions and climate events will be, but I believe characterizing them as an existential crisis for the human race is accurate. Money doesn't do much good when the food and water are poisoned, the air is toxic to breathe, and vast portions of the continents are under water. Unfortunately, we're not well adapted to dealing with slow moving threats such as these, so addressing the situation while there's still time seems dubious at best.
- hanniabu 8y ago

lcfcjs2 8y ago

I've worked for an oil and gas company for a while now, and it's really shameful how much political action they expect their employees to take.

melling 8y ago

There's plenty of oil in the world. Why do we feel the need to go after every last drop in the United States? It'll still be there in 100 years, if we need it.

ajmurmann 8y ago
Why are we still doing for oil anyways?! We are about to kill everyone on the planet with our fossil fuel addiction.
- magduf 8y ago
  Because we don't care. We want to drive our giant SUVs 2-3 hours a day so we can live in a McMansion in the exurbs, and we don't give a shit about what this is going to do to future generations. Furthermore, roughly half of Americans don't believe this is even a problem, and don't care about what any scientists tell them, because their religious leaders and favorite politicians tell them otherwise.
  - ajmurmann 8y ago
    Should we all have to be in agreement to finally take meaningful action? If we were in a space station with thin walls and some folks want to set up a shooting range for their own enjoyment we'd stop them by all means. We wouldn't care if those people believe in vacuum outside the space station or not. Might seem far fetched, but we are very much in the same situation.
    - hjek 8y ago
      > we'd stop them by all means Fully agree. This is not an issue where we just have to hope that one day someone in charge will fix it.
    - magduf 8y ago
      >If we were in a space station with thin walls and some folks want to set up a shooting range for their own enjoyment we'd stop them by all means. No, we wouldn't, nor should we. The reason is democracy: if the people in that space station have a democratic government, and more than half of them vote for leaders who promise them they can keep their shooting range, no matter how dangerous, well then everyone else just has to live with it. Hopefully, it's obvious here that democracy only really works when the citizens are smart enough to use it well. The problem is that, in many cases, they just aren't, which is what we're seeing now.

snowplay 8y ago

Please don't buy the hype. I'm going to guess that almost everyone would agree with preservation of environment and wildlife. But the drilling in northern Alaska is not what one may think. Drilling sites have small surface foot prints and reach out via horizontal drilling. Additionally, oil exploration on the north slope of Alaska has been going on since the 1960's with a remarkably good health, safety, and environmental responsibility record. Look at their record and what they've been doing. It may be a rare case, but Alaska's north slope environment has not been harmed by exploratory drilling sites.

sandworm101 8y ago
The actual drilling is not the real issue. The drills are indeed a negligible footprint. But every drilling site has a road. Every road has bridges. Then, should oil be pumped, pipelines and other support infrastructure. Surrounding all of this is then the local risk of spills, and the non-local implications of burning yet more oil. So to stop all that nasty stuff later, we need to stop the preliminary drilling today. Canada is struggling with abandoned oil infrastructure, tar sand developments that companies do not want to clean up. (There was a recent supreme court case about this.) For all the pre-planning and taxation, everyone knows that some day in the future it will be the government saddled with cleanup costs.
- marvindanig 8y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted. I used to work in an oil and gas firm earlier. And I agree with everything that you have just said.
- braythwayt 8y ago
  I don't know why this is being downvoted. Agree or disagree, it's a reasonable contribution to the conversation. To me, downvotes are for bad-faith arguments, axe-grinding, comments that raise issues answered in TFA, and other things that worsen the quality of conversation.
  - sandworm101 8y ago

appleiigs 8y ago

I work for oil & gas in the Canadian oil sands. If you want to us to stop drilling and mining, you should stop demanding that we do it. It’s no different than ivory from Africa or drugs from South America. In Canada we pay $1.20 per litre of gasoline ($4.50 per gallon) - love to see the US try that.

hjek 8y ago
Yes, the demand for oil is a huge problem, and we should all do our best to stop driving and flying all the time. That said, I'd encourage you, if it's something that's economically possible for you, to consider finding work elsewhere. Sticking to your analogy, the poacher who shoots the elephants is not entirely innocent either. I used to work for a sketchy company, so I also recognise that this is not an easy decision to make. I used to think If I don't do it, somebody else will.
- appleiigs 8y ago
  No, I'm not going to be demonized for producing something the entire world needs. How many on HN and Silicon Valley can say the same?

kjell 8y ago

I'll just leave this here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion

hjek 8y ago
I'll just leave this here as well: https://www.gorillatough.com/product/gorilla-super-glue/ https://www.gorillatough.com/product/gorilla-super-glue/

amalcon 8y ago

I went to Alaska last January. It's like no place else I've ever been. The folks there both really care about the environment and really care about the oil industry. It is a question of much debate there. It's an interesting case study. The state had a huge economic boom about 30 years ago as a result of the Alyeska pipeline. Lots of people (in relative terms, Alaska is not and will never be densely populated) moved there to take advantage. Basically everyone else is there because it has been their home for generations, or because they moved there for the nature aspect. Economic booms don't last forever. Now you have people who moved there for money (which is gone) consistently at odds with people who are there for other reasons. The former want to bring back the boom times, and will pretty much vote for anyone who says they can do that. The latter just want to move on with their lives and protect what has not already been damaged.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

I've always found it amusing that the Scandinavian countries lauded for being socialist utopias with the highest quality of life do so by drilling like Arabian princes, yet you only hear complaining about exploitation in the red state of alaska which only produces 5% of the nation's crude and has a generally so-so quality of life.