Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

The Christian Science Monitor article provides the following map:

As you can see, these areas are at least as large as ANWR, and in some ways more fragile. Both areas are significant wetlands, and have thousands of lakes.

So the plans to exploit what oil and gas may lie under and around Alaska continues to grow. The government and oil companies are quick to pitch how small a "footprint" they will leave through their activities, but Bush Watch busted that myth with their article What Size Shoe Does the Oil Industry Wear?. They provided this map:

Oil has a tendency to not stay put once you remove it from its natural environs. This is the case with the Prudhoe Bay pipeline leak that has spilled an estimated "1.4 million cubic feet of natural gas and an unknown quantity of crude oil."

False Choices
We are constantly presented with a false choice of the social and economic benefits of environmental destruction versus the environmental and costs of exploitation/development. Problematic in this type of analyses is that the costs of environmental damage is not as quantifiable as the dollar impacts of development. Therefore, the advantage consistently goes to exploitation.

The problem is that the costs of destruction are ultimately incalculable. What is the cost of the death of the oceans for example? Well, it effectively means the death of the planet. Want to put a price tag on that? Or the impacts of global warming which will displace billions of people, and kill hundreds of millions. What price tag do you put on that? Or the increase in air pollution from natural gas power generation facilities which are expected to increase childhood asthma by over 40%. How much is that worth?

The costs of these activities are real - not just sentimental. Comparing the costs of revenue for the petroleum industry, or temporary job gains are short term and do not consider long term costs. This has been the case in Oregon with logging. There was all pressure to open up forests and increase logging. The lives of timber communities depended on it. Unfortunately, when the trees are gone, so are the jobs. The "deaths" of the communities were delayed - not avoided.

It is a false paradigm to compare short term gains to long term destruction simply for the reason of not wanting to change course. Yes there may be short term economic gains from exploiting potential reserves in Alaska. Most of those gains will go to the petroleum companies, and the few who get work in the fields. For the consumer of oil, there will not be a decrease in the cost of oil. It is the elevated price that makes it "worth" drilling. There will not even be an increase in short or long term oil and gas security. Meanwhile, there will be massive environmental impacts. There will be the broader impacts of propping up a fossil fuel economy that is driving global warming and its own set of disasters. There is the cost of sinking economic resources into a sinking ship rather than transitioning to a survivable path.

The question that is consistently posed to us is the wrong question with a wrong set of premises. To continue to try and argue from that basis is not only fruitless, it lends credibility to the paradigm driving it.