Drill ANWR

ANWR is not maintained as a tourist destination. It's, well, a wildlife refuge. The world contains many places which I don't want to be ruined even though I will never personally visit them. About 96% of the globe, I would estimate.

Drilling ANWR is at best a short-term amelioration of a problem which is not going away. If we insist on extracting every last thimbleful of fossil carbon, no matter where it lies, before we get serious about facing the inevitable need to replace that energy source, we are only going to delay that need, not avoid it. We will create a gruesome mess in the meantime, with mountaintops planed off, oil shale regions turned into moonscapes, and further billions of tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, regardless of what happens at ANWR. We're going to have to change eventually. I say do it now and mitigate the damage our last few decades of scavenging will do.

Socialist nightmare? What the hell does socialism have to do with any of this? Do you know of any socialist countries where rampant environmentalists are empowered to preserve their environment and deprive their people of needed resources? Or is socialism just a buzzword you've been trained to throw around when referring to something you don't like?

There's a lot that could be said about the various points being made, often with some heat, here ...

1) conservation: you have to realize that conservation is only a short-term solution. Suppose everyone conserved, and we dropped oil use by, say, 10%. Well, in a few years, demand will have *increased* by 10% (more people, more industry, etc.), so after some short amount of time, you're right back where you started from. The only two long-term solutions are more production and developing alternatives to oil.

In the medium term, say 10 to 20 years, while the alternatives are maturing, we're going to need more production -- that means offshore drilling and ANWR drilling. (Please remember that the oil leases are for exploring land where there *might* be oil -- there's no guarantee that there's actually any oil there.) Other countries manage to drill offshore and in sensitive locations without significant environmental harm -- there's no reason the U. S. can't do so as well.

While it is true, ultimately, that we can't drill our way out of this problem, because there is only so much oil in the world and it will eventually all be gone, NOT drilling isn't going to solve the problem, either. It's a solution for the medium term to bridge us into getting off of oil entirely.

2) wind farms: suppose somebody came up with a way of extracting helium from the atmosphere involving erecting tall towers spread over thousands of acres of countryside. You KNOW that every environmentalist in the country would join a mad rush to the courts to sue the pants off anybody who wanted to do this. But, hey, thousands of tall towers all over creation for *wind energy*? And with huge whirling arms to boot? COOL! And never mind that the huge maintenance burden of all of these mechanical monstrosities makes their electricity much too expensive to be competitive with other forms of generation.

No-compromise environmentalism is one of the most dangerous threats to our economy today.

Terry (astrotrf)

Thank you for reading my entire post. I would like to point out a couple things, in my post I pointed out what I saw as a flaw in a previous argument about global warming, but then went on to say that I believe that the global warming argument can be ignored as I feel this is more of a moral issue about being good stewards of our planet. If you believe global warming is a scam fine, I still don't think that makes it ok to blindly use resources at what ever rate is convenient.

I am willing to admit that a million deaths may be high, I was just trying to point out that limiting the human cost of US foreign policy to ONLY American lives is not accurate or fair. I also recognize that it is not just Americans that are killing people, but the US has played its part as well.

I did not intend for my post to come across as a diatribe, just a response to previous posts. I admit I lean to the left, as for being a socialist I believe I said in my post it is not the job of the government to take care of you, use personal responsibility where you can, not really a socialist concept, and as for being a nihilist, if I believed that existence is senseless and useless I probably would not have made the original post.

Writing off conservation just because it is not the final solution does not mean it can't play an important part, even if it is just softening the blow to your own wallet.

As for wind generation being expensive to maintain, I don't see how what is basically an electric motor used in reverse is so much more complex than then technology required to build an offshore oil rig, or maintaining the complex distillation process for oil refining.

I believe short sighted capitalism is just as dangerous as no compromise environmentalism.

It might also help to look outside the US media.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6040054.stm

granted only 31% can be attributed to US actions, but that is still a significant number.

Luke Schmidt said:

Writing off conservation just because it is not the final solution does not mean it can't play an important part, even if it is just softening the blow to your own wallet.

I'm not writing off conservation; I'm just saying that it is only a short-term solution because, until the technology changes, demand will increase to overtake conservation.

Drilling offshore and in ANWR certainly won't help us *today*, but it will be a huge help in 10-15 years. The Interior Department states that currently-known recoverable reserves in the banned offshore areas alone amount to about 19 billion barrels of oil. That would provide 2-1/2 *years* of oil for the U. S. At the current price of about $130 per barrel, that's nearly 2-1/2 *trillion* dollars that the U. S. wouldn't have to send to OPEC, but would stay at home in our economy instead. That would have a major impact on the sliding dollar that another poster noted was a big problem for our economy, too.

And the 10 billion barrels expected from ANWR would add over a trillion dollars to that.

The argument about whether drilling would *change* the price of oil is specious. The real point is that we could keep over 3.5 *trillion* dollars in the U. S. economy instead of shipping it overseas, just by drilling for the additional oil we know we have here.

As for wind generation being expensive to maintain, I don't see how what is basically an electric motor used in reverse is so much more complex than then technology required to build an offshore oil rig, or maintaining the complex distillation process for oil refining.

To this, let me just restate the economic argument: you can operate a coal mine, with all of that mechanical equipment, haul the coal over a railroad, build a coal-fired power plant with all of *that* equipment, and STILL produce electricity more cheaply than a wind farm. It's true that a wind generator is essentially an electric motor in reverse, but you just don't get nearly enough electricity from each one to make it economical.

Terry (astrotrf)

After spending 30 years in the oil business, I can attest that there are recoverable reserves throughout some of the most pristine wilderness in our country. The South Florida Basin is a well kept secret and has the potential of more reserves than ANWR but is underneath the Everglades and offshore of the Florida Keys. Underneath Canyonlands in Utah is also some of the largest known reserves in the continential US. All of these are much more accessable than ANWR.

The problem is after we muck up all of our beautiful wilderness areas and National Parks, we'll still only recover about as much as one small oil field in the Middle East or South America. I had the opportunity to view seismic sections from Kazathstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in the late 80's when the USSR was breaking up and the size of the potential reserves in these largely uptapped regions dwarfs even Saudi, Iran and Iraq oil reserves. (Brazil has just found a 33 billion barrel oil field) If we don't start a Manhattan Project for alternative energy now we will be handing over the keys to the Federal Reserve to these countries.

We cannot drill our way out of this crisis, we have to use the intellectual and academic talent that we have and become the world leaders in non-petroleum based energy technology.

[QUOTE]Lynden Williams said:

The reason our gas prices are so high is because the dollar is totally worthless and all the other nations that sell us oil want the same purchasing power with their oil income that they had before.

You're right. The diminishing supply of cheap, readily available oil is only one factor. The dollar is essentially a promissory note. Any such a note is only as good as the credit worthiness of the person issuing it. The eroding value of the dollar necessarily has to lead to higher prices. A prime example some of you may have seen is the pre-WWII picture of a German with a wheelbarrow full of Wiemar Marks. He was trying to buy a loaf of bread. As our dollar continues to drop in value it will always take more of those dollars to buy anything, including barrels of oil.

Of course it doesn't help that for that last 60yrs, the U.S. has taken positions directly hostile to the folks with the oil. Piss off the folks with the oil and then try to buy it with devalued currency. Yeah, that makes sense.

Thanks for contributing a sane post based on actual knowledge rather than "OMG, gas is expensive! Drill, drill drill!" hysteria.

One thing that sickens me about this whole situation is how perfectly predictable it all was. It was clear 20 years ago or more that on some not-too-distant day petroleum would get really expensive. What did the brilliant American people do to prepare? They ran out and bought huge low-mileage vehicles, as though their profligate lifestyle was their eternal God-given right. Now they all run around like headless chickens. If it weren't all so potentially destructive it would be laughable.