By giving the green light this week to drilling in a particularly inaccessible part of the Arctic Ocean, has the Obama administration opened the door to environmental risk? Sure it has. Whether above the Arctic Circle or in the heart of Weld County, there will always be some level of risk when we’re hunting for oil.
But has the caliber of both preventive technology and pre-emptive regulation since the Deepwater Horizon disaster five years ago gotten better? Yes. Will it be good for national security to loosen the screws even more from our dependence on the oil-rich autocrats in Saudi Arabia? Yes again. And if we still have to rely on fossil fuels for our very existence, which we do, is this part of the Arctic as remote and removed from human life as just about any spot on Earth? Yes, absolutely.
The first story I ever did on Alaska’s oil-rich North Slope was an object lesson in environmental alarmism. Despite the risks that well-meaning environmentalists had projected when America started drilling there and sending the oil in an 800-mile-long pipeline to the port of Valdez, 40 years have passed and — aside from the Exxon Valdez shipping disaster, which was caused by a careless captain, not defective technology — the North Slope has stayed safe while our nation has grown more energy-independent.
One of the dangers they predicted was that oil flowing through the pipeline would melt the fragile tundra. It didn’t happen. Another was that a breach in the pipeline would forever scar the incomparable Alaskan landscape. That didn’t happen either. Another prediction was that migration patterns and general well-being of the native caribou up there would be altered to the herds’ distress. Well, I never got to interview a caribou to ask, but the truth is, each time I was there, there were herds of these breathtaking beasts wandering among the wells. They might not have been merry about the changes in their landscape, but they sure hadn’t melted away.
Look, we don’t want to be cavalier about perils and pitfalls when drilling starts, but we don’t want to be paranoid, either. There’s a parallel, in fact, to nuclear power plants, which still scare many Americans. Worldwide, you can count the number of grave disasters on one hand — the big ones were Chernobyl almost 30 years ago in the Ukraine and, more recently, Japan’s Fukushima (which was built with decades-old technology and slammed by an earthquake and tsunami).
Here at home, there are more than 60 plants in more than half the states (none here in Colorado). They provide roughly one-fifth of the nation’s electricity. And they’ve hardly hurt a soul. After the partial meltdown in 1979 at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the federal government measured everything from water to soil to human beings, and found no lasting contamination.
So we’re at a crossroads. We know that some forms of renewable energy are on the cusp of quantum leaps. In the solar sphere, more flexible and workable collectors are being built, while more efficient and effective storage and transmission devices are being developed. But we’re not there just yet. If we still want to drive our cars and heat our homes and power our computers, we have to depend mainly on fossil fuels — which is why we’re now agonizing over the Arctic.
Five years ago, I shot a documentary on one of Mexico’s first deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Every critical system for both monitoring and responding to a crisis had
double redundancy. And safety technology is even more advanced today.
The Arctic is a thousand miles from nowhere. It is almost irrefutably rich in resources — oil and natural gas.
If we want to wean ourselves from foreign obligations, we should run the risk.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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