In March, when President Biden approved the Willow Project, ConocoPhillips’ $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal land in Alaska, it was long asleep of my childhood. It brought back a memory, a memory of March 1989. I was watching the Exxon Valdez oil spill unfold on the evening news from my home in Southeast Alaska.
I was only eight years old, but the picture made a strong impression on me. Birds, seals and other wild animals are choking with oil. The once pristine coastline has been blackened by oil waves. Oil company executives hid behind podiums and promised Alaskans that they would take responsibility for the spill, but the accident dragged on and at least 10.8 million gallons of toxic cargo spilled from the wrecked tanker into the ocean. . It became clear then, as a child, that nothing was worth the price the Alaskans paid for Exxon’s recklessness. Decades later, the damage is still visible in Prince William Sound, where some wildlife populations, such as killer whales, have not recovered. Clumps of oil are still found below the surface of some beaches and waterways.
What I didn’t realize until recently was how cheap we tend to sell our most precious resources. To bolster support for the Willow Project, Republican Senator Lisa Markowski of Alaska has said its construction will create 2,500 jobs. And while many Alaskans support oil drilling precisely because it creates jobs, the economic impact is far from real long-term investment in the state’s economy. In Washington state, Amazon and Microsoft create burgeoning tech economies, while in Oregon, Nike and Intel employ her more than 30,000 locals. Meanwhile, industry-wide statistics show that Native Americans and Alaska Natives experience poverty at more than twice the rate of the Alaska average, yet these 2,500 new oil jobs are occupied by white men, males, and females. Some will be over-allocated to out-of-state residents.
Mr. Biden approved the Willow Plan despite explicit campaign promises to “no more drilling on federal land.” The logic of this turnaround is rooted in the same kind of geopolitics that has been used to justify every previous oil drilling attempt in Alaska. This dates back to 1958 when the British Petroleum Company surveyed the Brooks Mountains of Alaska in search of oil reserves to use as a hedge against holdings in potentially volatile regions of the Middle East. The oil giant then leased a large area of Alaska’s North Slope, but had problems with transportation until 1973, when the oil embargo forced it to move forward with approval for the Trans-Alaska pipeline system. The necessary political and economic conditions were in place. Once built, the pipeline carried crude overland from the Prudhoe Bay drilling site to Valdez Port, over 1,300 miles of tundra and permafrost. The first drop he arrived at the Valdez Marine Terminal on July 28, 1977 and by March 1989 had spilled at a rate of about 2 million barrels per day. That’s more than a quarter of his domestic crude oil production extracted from the landscape. Oil companies are unlikely to escape treating it as a true colony.
One way to understand the Exxon Valdez oil spill is to view it as a result of the trend toward treating Alaska as a corporate territory for the extractive industry. Another is to see this as a sign of a bigger problem. On the brink of a global climate catastrophe, every major oil spill underlines our collective ambivalence towards an industry that cannot become less sustainable or more harmful. It is now clear that it was an invitation to consider. We couldn’t do this because it was easier to imagine ourselves impotent, blameless and helpless, like oil-drowned birds. But to keep this delusion alive, you will soon need more than just turning your eyes away from the TV screen. With each passing day, the fate of our climate becomes easier to imagine and harder to ignore. Waiting for the next tipping point is as pointless as waiting for the next oil spill. If the Willow Project goes ahead, I fear that Alaska will have no chance of reversing its climate fate.
It’s never been clearer how much our future depends on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, but Biden is making unnecessary concessions to the oil industry, Researchers themselves have long known that the benefits of climate change are tied to our collective climate change doom. Laws like the Inflation Control Act are just window dressing. The United States remains the world’s largest producer of oil and gas and last year ignored a 2021 International Energy Agency declaration calling for an immediate end to the production of new fossil fuels. In terms of infrastructure, we have approved more oil and gas expansions than any other country. By approving new fossil fuel projects like the Willow Project, the United States will rely on oil and gas for most of its energy needs by 2050, when it officially promises to reach “net zero.” With this in mind, has there ever been a civilization that has set the bar so low for acting against the cause in the name of a political emergency, and perhaps the most obvious It is tempting to wonder if any civilization has set such a high bar for acting in response to a relevant emergency. human history.
Instead of an oil spill, one day I’ll turn on the TV and know I’ve crossed the irreversible climate threshold. And when that day comes, I know what oil executives and politicians will say. Because, like all Alaskans who remember what happened in March of 1989, I’ve heard it before.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. Scientific American.
