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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stribe30 who wrote (131689)	2/6/2001 5:10:27 PM
From: hmaly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570954

Strbe Re..<<Harry..thanks for that pro-oil "nothing will go wrong if we drill there" spiel.. now.. heres the alternate point of view for you.. written in a fine piece by Time Magazine... some snippets from a long but excellent article.<<<< Thanks for the article. First I would like to say that I didn't say nothing will go wrong. I said the damage should be miminal. Secondly, please permit me to point out several things. 1) the article states that the Anwar is 15 millions sq acres. The oil deposits comprise an area of approx. 120000 sq..acres, with most of the oil under just 12000 sq. acres. Less than 1% of the acreage. There are 182,000 head of caribou in the Porcupine herd, North America's largest. In a typical year, these migratory animals inhabit the coastal plain of ANWR during their sensitive late-spring calving period. <<<<<<<<< The article talks about calving, and the article implies that if the calving is distrurbed by say 10%, the herd population will decrease by 10%. Not so. Many other things determine the size of the herd, disease, food, and predators. In our area the primary determinent of the deer population is the food available to feed them during the winter;(heavy snow falls cover the food) and I presume the primary determinent of the herds size is the availability of food during the winter months. Far more calves are born than are needed to support the herd. Starvation during severe winters kills off enough to keep the herd population at a constant size. How many caribou the ecosystem can support determines the herd size now and I see no reason to believe it won't determine the herd size in the future. ...In the mid-'80s Interior conducted a study that concluded the caribou herd could decline by as much as 40 percent if the "core calving areas" within the 1002 Area were invaded by future developers. In 1987 the oil-potential report finally came out, and Interior changed its tune — big time. The department now said there were no "core" calving areas and that it had been an "error" to project a 40 percent caribou decline. Interior's new recommendation was: Develop the whole coastal plain, because an oil strike could produce 600 million to 9.2 billion barrels [a figure revised upward, by the year 2000, to 14 billion barrels]. The author states that because big oil reported oil in Anwar, Interior changed its tune. But he doesn't offer any proof that oil or more precisely pressure from the upper ups forced them to change their report. Its possible but not necessarily the reason. Wouldn't that be like me telling you that the only reason Bill gave Marc Rich a pardon was because of the gifts? Its also possible that the 40% figure was inflated when Interior wanted money from congress to put aside Anwar, and then reduced later once the calving scare achieved its purpose; more likely its a combination of both. Throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, the White House successfully opposed moves to raise gasoline taxes and to establish energy-efficiency standards for appliances, standards that would have saved more than a billion barrels of oil by century's end. The White House attitude caused an undeniable erosion in conservation. In heavily industrialized New England, for instance, oil use by utilities dropped by 17 percent from 1983 to 1985, but then soared 25 percent in '86 and has kept climbing. I agree completely that we should increase our conservation effort. In fact I would be willing to bet that I live in a better insulated house (with a high efficiency furnace, triple glazing and southern exposure)than most. But the fact remains that we need both conservation and exploration; not just one or the other. The Interior Department estimates that the U.S. has more than 50 billion barrels of crude outside known oil fields that could be put into production with existing technology. ANWR's is the largest single deposit among this untapped reserve. ANWR is seen by some as our biggest unloaded energy cannon. "The national security argument doesn't hold water," insisted Blake. "Not when you consider that there's no plan to conserve the oil we're wasting. Just because there is waste doesn't alter the fact that of the 50 billion barrrels of oil to be found, 20% of that oil is in Anwar. And Anwar is the largest and cheapest to put into production right now. There will always be waste of one sort or another. It takes time to make the necessary changes. Conservation won't happen overnight. One of the first things GW should do is institute a national energy tax, and raise the price of energy so conservation makes sense money wise. None the less, we will need the oil eventually. Its not a matter of if, but when. ............"Don't believe those Interior or any other estimates," cautioned Rivlin. "There has been a consistent overestimation of revenue projection from oil leases throughout the years. The more the oil companies want a place, the higher revenue is projected. That's part of their strategy — that they have to have it. The country has to have it." <<< That statement is true of both sides; both big oil and the enviromentalists. The snail darter was found to exists on others places besides by the Tom Bigbe dam the the spotted owl was a reason to set aside the forests of the northwest and the alar scare.

To: stribe30 who wrote (131689)	2/6/2001 8:33:00 PM
From: TGPTNDR	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1570954

Lovely Scott, Dopey, but lovely. Good god, man, we hit 1B bbls of crude in there & we'll fly in carabou parts 'till them ANWAR indians all die of obesity. I mean, think 1B X $10 each(That's about coverage after expenses) -- and there's only around 7K of them ANWAR indians? Shoot -- we can fly em each $1000 of carabou parts a month and still do ok. Ask the ANWAR indians how'd they like that deal -- I think they'd soon become nonconservationists! tgptndr Playing the advocate