re: #172 ausador

Please don’t get ticked off too easily, many people down in the lower 48 actually believe the puff pieces the media feed them about ANWR. That it is some small ecological paradise that needs to be protected from oil exploration and development so as not to disturb the Caribou.

They have not been there, they have not seen it, they don’t know that ANWR alone is as large as most of the states down here and that the majority of it is pretty much lifeless mudflats. They don’t know that on the North Slope the Caribou herds that were dying out from Native American “subsistence” hunting now have rebounded and are reaching record levels.

The fourty thousand acres or so of ANWR that the oil companies want to use would irreparably destroy the entire eco system and kill the poor baby Caribou, they have been told it, they accept it, they just don’t know any better, sorry. :(

(17 year Alaska resident)

Yeah, we could drill ANWR and get some oil. We probably should. The pipeline there is already built, and it was very expensive, and if we don’t get new oil to feed it, it’ll freeze up. It’s a bad idea to write off expensive infrastructure.

But drilling baby drilling won’t make much difference. ANWR is a drop in the bucket. World oil prices won’t even wiggle.

Long term? The problem is now a near-term problem. Oil supplies are going to be tight from here on in, and that’s putting to the side a problem that cannot really be put aside: there’s no safe place to put the CO2.

The only point of drilling would be that in order to build the new wind/solar/nuclear infrastructure we must quickly put in place, we have to use oil. For the time being, even the best policy involves large scale use of oil as a motor vehicle fuel and as feedstock to the chemical industry.