A win for Bush, A big loss for the world
The senate has voted to allow drilling in the Alaska wildlife refuge. With rising oil prices and high dependency on oil from an unstable region of the world, this move can sort of be rationalized. The only catch being that it doesn’t make sense.
They expect the Alaska refuge to provide 10.4 billion barrels of crude. That sounds like a pretty big number, 10.4 billion. Putting it in perspective, the US uses 20 million barrels of crude PER DAY. A quick bit of math shows that the Alaska refuge will provide the US with oil for the equivalent of less than a year and a half of oil at current usage. This oil, however, won’t immediately be available to us. It will take 10 years before we can actually see this oil. With the current administration’s policy of ignoring conservation in favor of greator waste and consumption, by the time this oil is available it will last an even smaller period of time.
The cost of this, however, will be the destruction of one of the few relatively pristine parts of the world. Somehow the view of caribou grazing looks just a little bit less nice when the few that remain are walking between heavy oil machinery.
