
Don't Sell Out the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil Companies - howard941
https://act.audubon.org/onlineactions/jhAgYIERqUyEWxgC-iPZFA2
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Communitivity
Everything is connected. The more we lose bird and insect species, the harder
it will be on the flowers,grasses, and trees. The harder it is on those, the
harder it is on use due to erosion and has CO2 scrubbing by the plants. We
lost the last White Rhino last year, 3 bird species, and others. The
extinction rate each of the last five years has been 1000 to 10000 times the
normal rate.

[https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-02-exti...](https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-02-extinct-
animal-species-2018)

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tmountain
As a society, we've chosen to prioritize financial interests above all else;
thereby, robbing future generations of the richness and majesty that makes the
world a beautiful place.

When propagandists successfully politicized environmental protection, they set
us on a path that not only ensured the mass extinction of thousands of species
of plants and animals, but also jeopardized the survival of our own species.

No one has a full picture of what the impacts of the impending extinctions and
climate events will be, but I believe characterizing them as an existential
crisis for the human race is accurate.

Money doesn't do much good when the food and water are poisoned, the air is
toxic to breathe, and vast portions of the continents are under water.
Unfortunately, we're not well adapted to dealing with slow moving threats such
as these, so addressing the situation while there's still time seems dubious
at best.

~~~
hanniabu
> As a society, we've chosen to prioritize financial interests above all else;

As a government*

While the government is supposed to be for the people, by the people, they
often act against the desires and interests of the population.

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eropple
Dunno where you are, but in the States somewhere between forty-five and fifty-
five percent of the voting public will vote for just about anything if it's
good "for the economy".

(That is the charitable reading of their voting record, anyway.)

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clarkmoody
Nah, they'll vote for anything their party tells them to. Most people don't
have any sort of guiding principles. Their decisions are mainly based on
tribalism, identity, and partisanship.

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snowplay
Please don't buy the hype. I'm going to guess that almost everyone would agree
with preservation of environment and wildlife. But the drilling in northern
Alaska is not what one may think. Drilling sites have small surface foot
prints and reach out via horizontal drilling. Additionally, oil exploration on
the north slope of Alaska has been going on since the 1960's with a remarkably
good health, safety, and environmental responsibility record. Look at their
record and what they've been doing. It may be a rare case, but Alaska's north
slope environment has not been harmed by exploratory drilling sites.

~~~
sandworm101
The actual drilling is not the real issue. The drills are indeed a negligible
footprint. But every drilling site has a road. Every road has bridges. Then,
should oil be pumped, pipelines and other support infrastructure. Surrounding
all of this is then the local risk of spills, and the non-local implications
of burning yet more oil. So to stop all that nasty stuff later, we need to
stop the preliminary drilling today.

Canada is struggling with abandoned oil infrastructure, tar sand developments
that companies do not want to clean up. (There was a recent supreme court case
about this.) For all the pre-planning and taxation, everyone knows that some
day in the future it will be the government saddled with cleanup costs.

~~~
braythwayt
I don't know why this is being downvoted. Agree or disagree, it's a reasonable
contribution to the conversation. To me, downvotes are for bad-faith
arguments, axe-grinding, comments that raise issues answered in TFA, and other
things that worsen the quality of conversation.

~~~
sandworm101
People downvote things that make them angry. The closer one gets to an
uncomfortable truth, the greater the anger.

I honestly think that the majority of downvotes on HN are from people silenced
by the posting limit. Lacking the ability to respond in text, their only
agency is to downvote. The calm and considerate people who read more and speak
less don't hit that limit.

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melling
There's plenty of oil in the world. Why do we feel the need to go after every
last drop in the United States?

It'll still be there in 100 years, if we need it.

~~~
ajmurmann
Why are we still doing for oil anyways?! We are about to kill everyone on the
planet with our fossil fuel addiction.

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magduf
Because we don't care. We want to drive our giant SUVs 2-3 hours a day so we
can live in a McMansion in the exurbs, and we don't give a shit about what
this is going to do to future generations.

Furthermore, roughly half of Americans don't believe this is even a problem,
and don't care about what any scientists tell them, because their religious
leaders and favorite politicians tell them otherwise.

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ajmurmann
Should we all have to be in agreement to finally take meaningful action? If we
were in a space station with thin walls and some folks want to set up a
shooting range for their own enjoyment we'd stop them by all means. We
wouldn't care if those people believe in vacuum outside the space station or
not. Might seem far fetched, but we are very much in the same situation.

~~~
magduf
>If we were in a space station with thin walls and some folks want to set up a
shooting range for their own enjoyment we'd stop them by all means.

No, we wouldn't, nor should we. The reason is democracy: if the people in that
space station have a democratic government, and more than half of them vote
for leaders who promise them they can keep their shooting range, no matter how
dangerous, well then everyone else just has to live with it.

Hopefully, it's obvious here that democracy only really works when the
citizens are smart enough to use it well. The problem is that, in many cases,
they just aren't, which is what we're seeing now.

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amalcon
I went to Alaska last January. It's like no place else I've ever been. The
folks there both _really_ care about the environment and _really_ care about
the oil industry. It is a question of much debate _there_. It's an interesting
case study.

The state had a huge economic boom about 30 years ago as a result of the
Alyeska pipeline. Lots of people (in relative terms, Alaska is not and will
never be densely populated) moved there to take advantage. Basically everyone
else is there because it has been their home for generations, or because they
moved there _for_ the nature aspect.

Economic booms don't last forever. Now you have people who moved there for
money (which is gone) consistently at odds with people who are there for other
reasons. The former want to bring back the boom times, and will pretty much
vote for anyone who says they can do that. The latter just want to move on
with their lives and protect what has not already been damaged.

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kjell
I'll just leave this here
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion)

~~~
hjek
I'll just leave this here as well:
[https://www.gorillatough.com/product/gorilla-super-
glue/](https://www.gorillatough.com/product/gorilla-super-glue/)

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tomatotomato37
I've always found it amusing that the Scandinavian countries lauded for being
socialist utopias with the highest quality of life do so by drilling like
Arabian princes, yet you only hear complaining about exploitation in the red
state of alaska which only produces 5% of the nation's crude and has a
generally so-so quality of life.

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appleiigs
I work for oil & gas in the Canadian oil sands. If you want to us to stop
drilling and mining, you should stop demanding that we do it. It’s no
different than ivory from Africa or drugs from South America. In Canada we pay
$1.20 per litre of gasoline ($4.50 per gallon) - love to see the US try that.

~~~
hjek
Yes, the demand for oil is a huge problem, and we should all do our best to
stop driving and flying all the time.

That said, I'd encourage you, if it's something that's economically possible
for you, to consider finding work elsewhere. Sticking to your analogy, the
poacher who shoots the elephants is not entirely innocent either.

I used to work for a sketchy company, so I also recognise that this is not an
easy decision to make. I used to think _If I don 't do it, somebody else
will_.

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appleiigs
No, I'm not going to be demonized for producing something the entire world
needs. How many on HN and Silicon Valley can say the same?

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Simulacra
ANWR, A place few people have ever set foot, let alone seen, including
environmentalist from a distance. Meanwhile the state has an unemployment rate
of about 7%, and a lot of people depend on the revenue from the sale of oil to
live. I say drill. Alaska isn’t the place you’re going to see Amazon build a
warehouse, at least let them have something.

~~~
ajmurmann
If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other
inhabitants, the humans should move. If my choice is between a polar bear or a
town in Alaska, I'll pick the polar bear anytime and move the town. We don't
need to turn every corner of the planet into a place serving our immediate
human needs. In fact we've already done that to too many places and are
ruining the planet for everyone while doing so.

On top of that we shouldn't be drilling for oil anywhere. We likely have
already turned the planet into a uninhabitable wasteland by burning too many
fossil fuels. We need to have a hard cut on our fossil fuel dependence and not
sorry it further.

~~~
trimbo
> If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other
> inhabitants, the humans should move.

The indigenous populations in the Arctic are often very poor. Who is going to
pay for them to move to Ft. Lauderdale, or even as far as Juneau? House them,
find them jobs, etc?

"Just move" is a non-solution also offered up for pretty much every factory
closing in the rust belt, coal miners in WV, etc. It vastly overestimates the
mobility of many families, especially those near or in poverty.

That said, Prudhoe Bay has double the national unemployment rate, so I don't
buy the argument that drilling is a magical answer to unemployment. (And we
should stop burning stuff for energy)

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dougmwne
The reality is that the oil companies usually hire non-natives. They'll make
big promises to the communities though before a project so that no one makes
waves. Haven't yet heard of a case where they delivered the jobs to the native
communities that were promised.

