Don't Sell Out the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil Companies
act.audubon.org
act.audubon.org
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-01-02-exti...
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.
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.
(That is the charitable reading of their voting record, anyway.)
These are not different things. The government is made up of people from society. There is no secret cabal running things, just a bunch of people. If you want to treat the government as something other than yourself, then this is the inevitable result.
Unfortunately, those who stand the most to profit are also those who can mitigate the damage for themselves with costly workarounds such as fresh bottled water imported from the opposite side of the world, high tech air filtration systems and secondary homes in remote places. In other words, they don't care.
Since when the common people have much say in any nontrivial large-scale policies?
Name one that the behindscen motivation isn't cooperate profit?
Perhaps we should be banning windmills and solar if we are going to care about the birds. https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe...
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/windmills-and-...
If Audubon cares about birds, they should promoting the banning of domestic cats. Invasive species propagation is a far bigger driver of extinction than variation in climate. In fact it’s the second largest driver of extinction behind hunting/fishing/harvesting.
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.
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.
the reality of climate change means that by proxy, greed is an existential threat that we need to be taking an aggressive disposition against.
That said, probably infeasible to achieve that type of governance in the US these days, so this Audobon approach of putting its foot down is possibly the most viable.
It'll still be there in 100 years, if we need it.
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.
Fully agree. This is not an issue where we just have to hope that one day someone in charge will fix it.
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.
Mr Einstein would be so disappointed.
In other news, Americans stopped buying sedans because they want bigger vehicles.
Do you use electricity?
Do you own anything plastic?
What about metal?
I think you'll find if you ask yourself these questions you will find that the answer to your rhetorical question was within you all along!
The poster child of this approach is the Saudi Arabia oil trading partnership of decades, where the increasingly wealthy Saudi state oil company have a control and share of profits that increases over time. Read a few wikipedia articles or this :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize:_The_Epic_Quest_for_...
It is true however, that Venezuala appears to be headed to breaking this pattern. It is related to the Hugo Chaves / Cuba / SAmerican Marxism fights and there are a lot of hard liners on both sides.
>“The Venezuelan Navy aggressively stopped ExxonMobil contracted vessels operating under an oil exploration agreement with the Cooperative Republic of Guyana in its Exclusive Economic Zone,” he said, saying Guyana had the right to explore there and urging Venezuela to respect international law and its neighbors’ rights.[0]
[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-guyana-venezuela-oil/vene...
Two months later Donald Trump is trying to oust Maduro for being 'undemocratically elected' while simultaneously praising communist Dictators in South East/East Asia.
Yeah, has nothing to do with American oil interests.
That sounds familiar? Oh, wait: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-defends-organi...
it's even worth it to burn some off just to make sure you get any at all[0]
[0]https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/05/1405...
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.
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.
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.
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)