Alaska mulls...

strange BBC spin.

Alaska wants more drilling, they did when the price was high, they did when the price was low. This is a consistent view. The revenue shortfall is just this years excuse. The movement to prevent drilling is from the continental US, not Alsska. Democrats and republicans there both want to drill. Some native tribes and environmentalists don't but they are a small minority.

Climate (whether it is changing or not) costs the US and Alaskan government a lot of money in alaska every year. The 1964 alaska earthquake was the worst.

More drilling in Alaska won't cause more climate change. Its not drawing the oil from the ground, its the burning that causes climate change. More drilling may cause more local air and water pollution in Alaska.

As an american that expects that oil prices to be much higher in 20 years, and imports more risky, I would rather import not while oil is cheap than to drill more off the gulf coast or in the arctic.

 

Using climate change effects to justify drilling for more fossil fuels is a bit of an oxymoron. But I'm not expecting Alaska to be leading the renewable energy industry. Still, if they move the at risk villages to higher land and install significant wind and renewable energy sources, there may be a silver lining. As for paying for it . . . FEMA.

This summer, 2015, part of the Hudson Bay was slow to melt and an ice breaker on a research trip was diverted back to ice breaking. The villages on the ice-locked shore were running low on diesel for their generators. Think about it, native villages dependent on fossil fuels . . . instead of animal fats and scrub. The climate deniers tried to use this delay to claim the Arctic was ice locked and thus no global warming . . . and yet the villages got their fuel. Did they get a couple of wind turbines too?

I'm sympathetic to the problem but have no brilliant insights. Climate change is going to make many, many more of these conflicts in the future.

Bob Wilson