Arctic Drilling: A Model for Great Lakes Water Diversion

March 23, 2005

“Why shouldn’t we drill for oil in the arctic? We need that oil.”
That’s the attitude of many Americans who can’t understand the controversy over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
They imagine that the oil from the Arctic -- our last, final, gone-for-good reserves of oil for all time to come -- is going to be funneled down here to the United States to keep their cars rolling over to Walmart at less than $2 per gallon.
They imagine that our multinational oil companies have a patriotic allegiance to the folks back home.
They say: “It’s our oil, and to hell with the caribou and polar bears and unpatriotic environmentalists. We need that oil, right here in America so we can keep driving our big gas guzzlers without a care.“
But where will the Arctic oil really go? To Petoskey or Traverse City, or Wolverine or Beulah?
Or to Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul?
“I am sure China will be thrilled with the Bush decision to drill in Alaska,” said the noted energy economist Philip Verleger Jr. in the New York Times. “Oil in Alaska cannot easily or efficiently be shipped to our Gulf Coast refineries. The logical markets are on the West Coast of the United States and in Asia. Consumers in China and Japan, not the U.S., will be the real beneficiaries of any big Alaska find.”
Verleger claims that the oil companies will naturally turn to Asia with that easy Arctic oil, sticking us “at the mercy of unreliable suppliers, such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. It is simple geography.”
We Americans are saps. When we imagine drilling for oil in the Arctic, we also imagine a big pipeline bringing that black gold down here to the lower 48 states to bail out our lazy, wasteful ways -- too lazy or greedy or deluded by oil company propaganda to require our own Congress to demand higher mileage from the automakers.
A recent article in Newsweek notes that we have the technology to create 500 mile-per-gallon cars which could run on a blend of ethanol, electricity and a tiny amount of gasoline. But the auto companies are deep in bed with the oil industry, and since no one is cracking the whip to require better fuel mileage, it’s business as usual, along with the plunder of our last, final, drop-dead oil resources in the Arctic.
Plunder for the profit of oil companies and the benefit of Asia.
You can see the same model for plunder coming decades down the pike on the issue of diverting water from the Great Lakes.
At present, we have all sorts of assurances from the governors of the Great Lakes states and the administrators of the Canadian provinces that the water of Lake Michigan or Lake Superior will never be diverted.
These same sort of promises were made as far back as 1980 -- 25 years ago -- in regard to drilling for oil in the 19-million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
When the world gets even thirstier than it is today, rest assured, the Great Lakes will be its punchbowl for the same reasons we now look to drain the Arctic of its oil. As Petoskey environmentalist and attorney John Rohe noted in a recent letter to the Express, the population is booming in the parched Southwest, even as it declines here in the Midwest. Population equals political power and more representatives in Congress. “In time, our voice for Great Lakes water conservation will be reduced to a whisper,” Rohe noted.
But at least, we can walk into those situations with our eyes wide shut, so to speak.
So the next time someone defends the idea of plundering our last, vital reserves of oil in the last pristine place in America, set ‘em straight, won’t you? Let them know that our good-hearted, patriotic oil companies will be selling that stuff to wherever it commands the highest dollar (or the yuan as the Chinese currency is presently known), and not for the benefit of gullible American motorists.

Our expensive empire
Can you imagine what would happen if the Italians pulled their military bases out of the United States? Or the Germans or the Filippinos or the Afghans?
What would happen if Turkey, Indonesia or South Korea decided to pull their army bases out of America? What if Colombia or Japan or Taiwan suddenly decided they no longer needed to have troops on our soil to defend us from invasion by Canada or wherever?
What? You mean there aren‘t any Turkish army bases here, or Germans or Italians? You say we don‘t need defending? You say the Japanese don‘t need to spend any more on our behalf, defending America?
Well, why then does America have military bases in all of those countries and more?
In fact, according to Chalmers Johnson, author of the bestseller, “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,“ the United States has hundreds of thousands of troops stationed in 61 major military bases in 19 countries around the world. But that‘s using the Department of Defense‘s narrowest definition of a “major installation,“ he writes. “If one included every kind of installation that houses representatives of the American military, the number would rise to over 800.“
Johnson, a professor at the University of California and president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, notes that it would be ridiculous for the Italians to have air force bases in our country, as we have in theirs.
By extension, it‘s ridiculous that we American taxpayers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to “protect“ rich countries such as Japan and Germany years after the end of the Cold War at a time when our own country is struggling to pay for education, Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention Social Security.
Why don‘t we have national healthcare in this country? Why are 40 million Americans uninsured, with many driven into bankruptcy from calamitous health bills?
One obvious reason is because of the global empire we‘re carrying on our backs. Here, on the second anniversary of the war in Iraq, with yet another money-sucking military outpost planned for decades, we need to start asking, why the empire? Why are we there?