The Source for Trucking News, Opinions and Trucking Jobs | ANWR

This won’t be the first time I’ve talked about something I know nothing about, but there are some good sites listed you should check out for yourselves.  What got me started in checking this out was when Carter was in Alaska while we were there and a few of the comments the locals said on TV and the radio.

The Artic National Wildlife Refuge is under a major debate nowadays.  More than a few people think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but one thing I do know is, you don’t go to someone’s house and tell them how to live, like some people - 

Carter said maps of Alaska were frequently spread around a room
adjacent to the Oval Office. He has said he learned three maps well
during his term: the city of Tehran (where U.S. hostages were held),
the Sinai (scene of the Israel-Egypt peace accords) and Alaska.

A map on his desk makes him an expert? It sure worked on the other two issues, what makes anyone think he’s right about this one?

The governor, both senators and most of Alaska and the Native population that actually live in the area in question want to go ahead with drilling, but Carter says they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Carter set aside even more of Alaska as wilderness back when he was President (and relevent) and he’s pretty proud of getting that done. No one can touch it in any way shape or form. Most of Alaska is National or State parks or some kind of wilderness refuge anyway. Some Alaskans think they can take care of their own state better than the feds can. Since they’re unable to use their natural resources they have to depend on tourism in a big way and most tourism isn’t year round. When we were there we saw a commercial about how Alaskans should be thankful for the cruise ships and  how much cruise lines spend in Alaska. Besides the passengers spending money, the ships use a lot of support services (food, fuel, etc.)

Back to the ANWR. Here it shows where and what ANWR is. The part of ANWR in question that was set aside by Congress for drilling after an environmental impact study part of the coastal plain called 1002. This 1002 area is 8% of the total ANWR area and if production goes ahead only a small portion of that 8% will even be affected.

As this page points out - there are NO ENDANGERED SPECIES of any
kind in the entire ANWR area. You can hire a registered guide and go
hunting in ANWR. Carter’s stupid comment from this page -

"(Cheney) may think
it’s a tiny footprint but the animals up there are not likely to react
that way," Carter said. "Would we want to make a minimum impact with an
oil well in Yellowstone National Park? Would an oil well in the bottom
of the Grand Canyon leave a tiny imprint?"

For one thing most of the animals in that area are migratory and haven’t even been in 1002 for years. The caribou calving that everyone brings up are  in a different place every year. The cows are tracked by satellite and are projected to be in Canada this year, nowhere near 1002.  And the tiny footprint -

If oil is discovered, less than 2000 acres of the over  1.5 million acres of the Coastal Plain would be affected. That¹s less than half of one percent of ANWR that would be affected by production activity.

And for the record if Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon had 1.5 million barrals a day that some say, I’d be the first in line to buy a ticket to watch them drill cheering them on!  The stupid part is that most people will never see 1002 in their or their childrens lifetimes or ever. Nothing endangered, no one is going to see it, the North Slope and Prudhoe Bay oil fields are only 100 miles away and the pipeline is already in place and production there is declining. Prudhoe Bay was estimated at 9 billion barrels and it’s still producing at 13 billion barrels.  Let’s get drilling and git ‘r done!

The experts that Carter quotes say there’s hardly any oil there anyway. What if they’re wrong and there is a sh**load of oil there?  1002 is projected to have 10 billion barrels.  More than any onshore production in the lower 48, including Texas and Louisiana.

Back to the people that live there. The native tribe that lives there is for drilling to help their economy and give them jobs. The truth about natives not wanting to drill there is from natives that don’t live there. This page sheds light about how the other tribe that didn’t find oil in their land (where they decided the caribou would be fine walking around drill sites on their land, but not on 1002. They won’t benefit at all if there’s oil found in 1002 because they didn’t sign an agreement with the rest of the natives in Alaska that everyone would share with each other no matter what part of Alaska (or Canada) the tribes were in. One theory is they didn’t sign the agreement because they thought they had a "gold mine" on their land and they didn’t want to share. Now that nothing was found on their land, they are the "native spokespeople" on the other side that don’t want this drilling because they wouldn’t get anything from it.

This page about the natives is supposed to be non-partisan, I don’t know about the anwr.org site. It’s pretty convincing on the pro-drilling side. The Anchorage Daily News has this section  filled and updated with ANWR articles.