Thursday, April 27, 2006

Please Leave Alaska Alone

Senate Republicans have proposed giving all American taxpayers a $100 rebate to offset gas prices. Nice, huh? However, attached to this proposal (once again) is opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. How many times are we gonna have to go through this?

And $100? WOW! THANKS! As if that helps much. That's about 2 tanks of gas in the car I am currently driving. I'll give all the senators $100 to leave Alaska alone and start thinking about legitimate long-term solutions instead of short-term quick fixes with irreversible consequences.

3 comments:

Tara said...

And on behalf of the caribou, polar bears, countless bird species, other wildlife and native Inuit people, I'd say, "NO!"

tschy said...

This country will cease to exist well before we get to the point of not needing any oil. So, like it or not, we need oil.

ANWR is not a short-term solution at all. It is estimated that it would take 15 years before oil from the 8% of ANWR in the Costal Plain would hit the market.

I beleive the native's are not against the drilling. They want to be involved and want to make sure that it is done in a reasonable, safe manner that utilizes the advance in technology and the lessons that were learned in other Alaskan oil fields. This seems like a reasonable approach. It seems that taking the approach of No, No, No period - is the approach that is unreasonable.

Isn't it prudent to consider the upside - evaluate the true impact on the wildlife and environment? You can't rely on what the extrem-wack-o environmentalsits have to say. If it were up to them, they probably wouldn't let you build the addition on your house becuase it would displace the earthworms. After all, why are they any less important than a caribou?

Larry Feathers said...

My opinion is that any time and money used to extract more oil equals less time and money used coming up with alternatives to oil. In that respect, drilling in Alaska seems like a short term solution to a long term problem. And the problem isn't just that one day we are going to run out of oil. It's that oil is filthy. I don't know if Global Warming is true, but I do know that it sucks to breathe air in Dallas when it's 100 degrees outside. I don't need to rely on any scientist (environmentalist wacko or not) to tell me that the quality of air in Dallas is shit. There are better alternatives that are cleaner and that would be cheaper over the long haul. Drilling for oil in Alaska seems like a convenient but imprudent thing to do.