Cant drill because of polar bears...?

Question

the artic reserve has billions of barrels of oil we could tap into if it wasnt for some polar bears, but this is another example of how us dammed americans are soft and will always be at the mercy of forgien oil....Why cant the bears be moved or is their surival more important than ours?

Answer 1

Polar bears have increased by over 600% in the last 30 years.

If we do not do it, someone else (like Russia) will.

We are our own worst enemy.

The US has the best technology in the world, I would rather depend on us to get the oil safely than think other countries will care and do it safely.

Answer 2

It has nothing to do with polar bears.  Pull up in a drill rig with a drill team they will move on.

It has to do with people like Harry Reed and Nancy Polozi.   Two of the most left wing persons in our government.  They are elected by people who live in fantasy land, people who should by their own actions be forced to live off the grid, if even as much as 1% of the power comes form coal, nuclear or Hydroelectric, since these nuts want all of that done away with.

One day perhaps the people will wake up and see the truth, right now, we have them in charge.

short of a common people revolt, I don't know what else to do.

Answer 3

its peoples lack of understanding and unwillingness to accept what we have done to our planet that is the cause of the problems - not the bears

the bears one of the many symptoms of the problems

and NO the alaskan oil is NOT the answer - its a big part of the problem.

but then again maybe you LIKE smog, cement and asphalt covered landscapes, wall to wall pollutant spewing vehicles and polluted water.

grow up and get real before the last flower dies and the last wild animal gets hung up on some so called hunters wall

sheesh!!

either that or get out of the way and let people who do care get the things that are need to be done, actually done!

Answer 4

They will be moved off the list soon don't worry.  They were declared in trouble because of "global warming and loss of habitat due to global warming". This will be debunked shortly.

Answer 5

Wrong.

ANWR would supply our oil needs for a few months, and wouldn't be available for 10 years at most estimates.

The concern is for the entire ecosystem of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, and most notably for the caribou. But mostly it is about resisting the urge to develop one of the last expanses of actual wilderness on the planet.

The survival of the human race does not hinge on the access to a 6 month supply of oil.

Answer 6

It seems as if you may be misinformed.  There is no correlation between polar bears and resistance to drilling in Alaska.  It mainly has to do with the likely environmental impact costs and the measly about that is actually present in ANWAR.

As someone who works as an environmental consultant with projects in Alaska, I know of the millions of government and industry dollars flow into cleaning up the hydrocarbon contamination that is already present in that region.  Part of the problem is that natural attenuation is very slow and the contaminants persist at toxic levels for a order-of-magnitude longer period than other, more temperate climates.  Personally, I'm neutral on the issue because I like the work.  Alaska is beautiful during the summer and oil companies can't help but make a big mess it seems.

Another factor that you may not be aware of is that Alaskan crude contains much higher concentrations of natural benzene than Gulf of Mexico, California, Venezuela, or Middle Eastern crude.  Benzene is a potent carcinogen (cancer causer) that is very expensive to remove from gasoline during refining.  Unfortunately, normal combustion engines and catalytic converters only remove a small fraction of the benzene in gas.  There are also issues with benzene off-gassing during fueling.  A lot of cancer-causing vapors shooting into your face is why you should "top off" your tank.  So, using more Alaskan oil would be more expensive to make safe gas and/or would cause you higher insurance premiums because of the increased incidence of cancer.

Estimates for total oil reserves in ANWAR is 10.4 billion barrels of crude oil.  The US consumes approximately 22 million barrels of oil PER DAY.  Doing some math, this shows that the oil is enough to fuel the US for about 15 months.  We import 14 million barrels per day.  So if domestic production stayed the same, we could do without imports for about two years with ANWAR oil.  To make this a reality, tremendous effort would need to be undertaken (and pollution), and if we started today the wells wouldn't be online until 2013.

Oil companies have been aware of the oil in ANWAR for decades.  Because of the above issues, it has attracted little interest.  So why this an issue big enough to engage the right wing noise machine to come up with silly and inflammatory, and "anti-environmentalist" agruements seems curious.  Perhaps some small-scale oil-friend of the Bush administration wants to make a small fortune working a field until he retires.

My co-worker has an old friend who owns a multimillion dollar business rehabilitating old oil fields in Texas.  It is very interesting stuff, involving processes like "frac-ing" and carbon dioxide extraction to turn once "dry" fields into productive ones again.  Using improved technology, his company has rehabilitated fields that have yielded an additional 2 billion barrels.  That is pretty impressive I think.

So, Alaskan oil is dangerous, very expensive, and has very high environmental risk.... it isn't about the recently "threatened" status of the polar bear.