This is part one. Both part one and two from www.sightings.com/general9/death.htm Each person on this forum is part of the solution to the situation in this article. My gratitude for all of you is very great!

Global Totalitarianism And The Death Of Nature - Part I & II By Diane Harvey merak@sedona.net 4-2-1

The relentlessly purposeful relationship between the dark ruling minds of Earth and the agonizing death of the natural world is mystifying. What could possibly motivate the present owner-operators of this globe to allow planetary life-support systems to degrade into a state of toxic shock? The death-throes of nature intensify, yet the fatally destructive human operations causing this continue unabated on all levels, as if this was not happening, and as if this unfortunate state of affairs had nothing to do with human life. We must ask ourselves if those powerful and secretive men at the helm of this sinking ship, and therefore ultimately responsible for the massive poisoning of an entire planet, have therefore genuinely lost their minds. We wonder if such ardent devotees of greed have finally been overwhelmed and driven mad altogether by such a demonic master-vice. Are the ruling powers of this planet adrift then, without so much as the crudest rudder of self-preservation for guidance? Are we being carried along in a slipstream of utterly reasonless chaos, toward an irreversible fall into the abyss? There are other possible explanations. Perhaps this is happening because the pleasures of power and wealth are so intensely gratifying to those who fuse with such phantoms that reality pales in comparison. Maybe those who are steering current civilizations as if there was no tomorrow, and all those who are enjoying the cruise blindfolded, deeply prefer not to see what is happening all around them. We wonder how many there are who know or care about the actual state of their food, water, air, all the other forms of life here, and of the earth itself. It is somewhat difficult to overestimate the sheer magnitude of denial in the human race. Is the mental defect of the ruling demonocracy and its myriads of adherents merely the lifelong habit of sheer willful ignorance? It is always possible to develop a shield of such hardened egotism and implacable denial that even immanent self-destruction cannot penetrate. However, another type of insanity is even more strongly indicated here. The purposeful destruction of the world may serve a larger purpose. Consider the ramifications if the death of nature is a carefully planned, well thought-out and deliberate act by the faceless rulers of Earth. The forces of global totalitarianism may actually believe they can replace all natural forms of life with man-made simulations. We need only call to mind a portion of the vast array of recent advances in the scientific realm to understand the direction of the juggernaut. Simply consider the future array of replacement possibilities through genetic engineering, cloning, and nanotechnology. Why has there been such an extreme push to bring these new technologies out into the world, regardless of resistance, and despite complete lack of real knowledge of their long-range safety? The answer is that totalitarianism seeks literally for control of the totality. There are wholesale substitutes for nature, man-made fabrications composed of false versions of life forms and life processes, already being forcibly superimposed on natural reality. From food to animals to humans, the corporate-owned replacements for natural life are being unleashed. The darkest conceivable plan is at work here. In order to even begin to realize the full magnitude of this evil, it is necessary as never before to fathom what nature really means for the spiritual and material existence of the human race. Nature is free. The forces of totalitarianism have understood, that for this very reason, nature has to go. Until now, the dominant power structure has been unable to do anything about this dangerous oversight. Because not only is nature itself free, but it is the source of all practical freedom for our species. Nature is the living body of the world, the source of all human physical existence: the font of our health, well-being, material security, and individual freedom. The inconceivably complex web of life supporting us in this physical world is the literal bedrock of spiritual evolution for every soul on earth. Nature is our own free physical existence itself, and therefore is being methodically annihilated. The reason is because as long as the natural world exists and is free, there remains a dangerous amount of potential freedom available to human beings living in harmony with nature. The global corporate power structures, inextricably combined with their wholly-owned subsidiary governments, militaries, and educational systems, have minutely worked-out plans for the future of the human race. Even those of us who thought we understood just how evil these people are, have perhaps misunderstood the actual scope of their greed for power and control. Because it is appears that they have engineered the continuing wholesale destruction of nature as the greatest business opportunity of all time. They have in mind to completely remove humanity from God s creation, and to force mankind into total dependency on their replacements . And then to control us absolutely through these very substitutes for natural existence they plan to sell us. There are multilevel, multipurpose goals that would be simultaneously achieved by such an unthinkably diabolic program. Above all, the disappearance of the natural world would leave the forces of corporate/military/government as the sole custodians of the human race. Think of what it will mean if all human life in the future depends for its survival on the corporate simulations of natural life and natural processes. They may well be quite prepared to offer us solutions to all our problems , through selling mankind the means to exist at all after nature is gone. I propose that the forces of corporate totalitarianism are deliberately destroying this entire world in order to sell their simulated version of it back to us at a profit. And these pieces of fabricated technological substitutes, being fabricated, patented and owned by corporations, would be the means to implement a level of control and manipulation of the human race such as we cannot now even imagine. We can glimpse the gist of the future being planned for us by simply extrapolating from present developments. Corporations have already stated their plans to widely patent human genetic material. Obviously they have in mind to own all of our genetic material, and therefore our very bodily existences, preferably before birth. To achieve this they will offer all sorts of inducements to seduce the unwary: health , good looks , talents and abilities will be the bait. The natural desire of parents to provide the very best for their unborn children will do the rest, causing them naively and eagerly to swallow the hook. This plan for corporate ownership of the very bodies of human beings is already well under way. With further advances in nanotechnology, chemical, and electromagnetic manipulation, the potentials for intimate micro-control of the entire human mechanism from conception to death are staggering. And it is far from only the human kingdom that is meant to come soon under totalitarian ownership. Agribusiness and other allied corporate interests are determined to replace all sources of food from the vegetable kingdom with their patented replacements . What they cannot profit from through worthless substitutes , they buy outright- such as water rights around the world. Drinkable water itself will be very soon owned by multinational corporations and sold to us at a profit. However unbelievably outrageous it is that the last vestiges of nature and all natural resources are coming under totalitarian ownership, humanity as a whole is blandly accepting this as inevitable . And if we are collectively this far gone as a species, and so completely out of touch with reality as to passively accept having our very lives and sustenance stolen, it certainly will be inevitable. size=2 Then there is the little matter of the larger systems in nature coming under some sort of fancied harebrained control by a select and secretive portion of mankind. The United States Air Force, for instance, openly brags of its plans for owning the weather by the year 2025. This means that the arrogance of profit-and-control science has now dementedly progressed to include designs on the totality of all great natural world-systems themselves. There is no longer any rational limit to the thinking of those who steer this spaceship through space. They believe they can now eventually override every last part of the original software of creation and proceed to their own versions of manual controls. There are other aspects of this monumental world-grab underway that want thinking about. Corporations have accumulated most of the wealth on this planet by polluting it. The race to extract natural resources at all costs, regardless of effects on the environment, has left the earth, water and air far more disastrously poisoned than most are willing to realize. It is beginning to vaguely dawn on even average self-absorbed people that they are now increasingly, even dangerously unhealthy, and so are their innocent children. But perhaps all this misery and suffering in nature and humanity is merely the next carefully worked-out opportunity for the next stage of profiteering. It is entirely possible that one of the next great planned global corporate businesses will be the implementation of new technologies for cleaning up various types of existing pollution. Since all parts of nature are now dangerously poisoned, the potential for fortunes derived from purification of polluted materials and elements is practically infinite. Do such secret methods exist in the hidden pipelines of the same industries that caused pollution in the first place? Could these be offered at just the right moment to save us, at a very high price? You can judge for yourself if multinational corporations could conceivably be so intelligently evil as to understand they could make immense profits both by destroying the world and resurrecting it.

-- seraphima (djones@kodiak.alaska.edu), April 03, 2001

Answers

Response to Global Totalitarianism& thte Death of Nature

After reading this and some other messages on other forums think I have the answer. The easiest way to save the earth is to cut population drasticly or totally wipe out us. First thing in the morning lets all just step in front of the first bus we can find.

-- David (bluewaterfarm@mindspring.com), April 04, 2001.

Perhaps it's the bifocals and/or the dyslexia, but I have too much trouble reading long posts.(I've missed reading several posts). Would someone kindly tell me what the above is about? Thanks

-- Cindy (SE In) (atilrthehony_1@yahoo.com), April 04, 2001.

Well, there is a simple energy budget. As we use more and more energy to pollute the world, we use up the resources of fossil fuel. Since the laws of thermodynamics do not allow for creation of energy, we'll need more to fix the problems. Since we are hell bent on using up all the fossil fuel as fast as possible, it will run out at some point. The solution? I guess we don't need one, since we only think four years at a time.

-- David C (fleece@eritter.net), April 04, 2001.

Cindy I think it says,who ever by stock in water is gonna be a rich person in the future

-- Steve (a12goat@cs.com), April 04, 2001.

Well that was really depressing, I feel like a chicken fell on my head, or was it the chicken. . ., now I remember it was the chicken who said the sky is falling. One nice benefit of getting older is that it's easier to live in the moment cause you keep forgetting things that have happened or things that are supposed to happen. Have a nice day.

Blessings, Judy

-- judymurray (nomifyle@yahoo.com), April 04, 2001.

Everyone has a theory on what the future holds. The one in this post is about the corporations,military and gov't owning the natural resourses in the future and selling them back to us.And cloned people in the future will be corporatly owned,because there's a patent on their altered genetic make-up..My theory ,although I don't think it's worth making a web pg. for , is that great advanced civilizations existed before and collapsed,maybe due to ,it was to big and couldn't be managed,maybe war,or a natural event like a flood or space debris hit the earth.We see the pyramids in Egypt, the ones in Mexico,Collisiums in Rome,Greece.Some people believe they harnessed electric like we have,and they had laser technology to cut the stones to make pyramids.There is pleanty of sand in the dessert to make glass and glass can be shaped to make magnifying glass,and using the sun as a photon source with a series of magnifying glass lined up it could be possible?.Also in Greek mythology,they have stories of creatures that were half man half animal.Clonning.The half man half animal stories has no solid proof,so they remain myths. But we know now it can be done ,and maybe it has in the past .But the pyramids are fact.So we know great civilizations did exist in the past. Nicotine from tobacco has been found in the skin tissue of mummies in Egypt, so it's now believed ,since tobacco is a plant from the Americas, that Egyptians did travel the world .Maybe like the season of a year,there's a bigger season that man accumulates large ammounts of technology uses it for a while then before he can explode the planet with it, it just collapses.Like a safety valve. Alot of people and animals die.There's a few left over, like seeds .And we start the new season,like it's spring time,and it happens all over again.Maybe before the civilization collapses,we build space capsules that travel long distances to other planets that can sustain our species,and like a seed pod ,land on those planets and spread life.Proof of the dinosaur has showed that life can be almost comletely eliminated on this planet and start all over again.Even oil which we don't consider a renewable resource ,is renewable.It,s made from organic matter.If most of plant animal and human life did die, all the dead organisms will eventually turn back into oil.It,s a waste of time to fear what will come, and we could as a human race ,try everything we know to keep the earth from some kind of future disaster.But if it's a natural process for civiliztion to crumble and get rebuilt again ,then there's nothing we can do to stop nature from doing what it does.Not even recycling our cans and news pappers can help.It's just a theory.

-- Steve (a12goat@cs.com), April 04, 2001.

Earth's environmental problems are like a car speeding toward a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. Those of us (environmentalists) who are screaming to hit the brakes are locked in the trunk and can't be understood.

-- debra in ks (solid-dkn@msn.com), April 04, 2001.

Well, THAT's a picture, Debra!

-- Joy F (So.Central Wisconsin) (CatFlunky@excite.com), April 04, 2001.

I like Davids idea. You first, I'm right behind ya, hehehehehe

-- jz (oz49us@yahoo.com), April 04, 2001.

I try to look to the past for answers also. I found Gibbons' "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" very interesting. Many happenings just in the last century under the cover of the "industrial revol;ution" offer study material for future generations. As I currently cannot board a spaceship out of here (maybe it will be possible in a few decades as more ISS platforms are built and inhabitable planets are found), I will do my best to ensure the health of the part of the body I infest, living as a benificial virus instead of a cancerous one.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), April 09, 2001.

Thanks Jay... and thanks seraphima for the post!

I don't generate my own electric yet, but I don't use any more than I have to (other than being here). I don't waste water, etc etc etc. Most of the folks here do these things too.

But, society at large (individuals excluded, cause I know there ARE some) thinks that its perfectly ok to use whatever you want, however much you want, and not think about anything else. They can't be bothered to even wonder if the next-door neighbor has enough water to drink, let alone if the fish all die in the rivers behind the dams.

I live in the West, where this is a big issue, but folks in other parts of the country are going to have to start dealing with it, too. I don't think there is a person on the forum here that doesn't try to conserve resources. Those others, though, will make even our belts tighter.

Fossil fuels, etc etc are more expensive than water, but there is a shortage of all. They don't build houses with handsaws anymore, folks! As the electric and gas prices rise, so will food, housing, clothing - all the necessities... For those who don't make their own. Most of us will be ok - but what about our extended families and our friends?

And - China.... China is more interesting yet... Do you have any conception as to how much stuff comes here from China? Trade sanctions? How would everyone here like to lose up to 20% of their annual income, let alone the prices we'd have to pay to buy that same stuff made here.

-- Sue Diederich (willow666@rocketmail.com), April 09, 2001.

Here's a reason to hope. I sure hope the Lovins are right.

Frozen Assets? Alaskan Oil's Threat to National Energy Security by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins "We must continue, I believe, to safeguard the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last truly wild places on Earth—the Serengeti of the Americas." —President Clinton, January 17, 2001

As you read this issue of RMI Solutions, Congress is debating whether the oil potential beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska is worth the environmental damage caused by extracting and burning it. Largely unexamined so far are more basic questions: Is it profitable? Is it necessary? Is drilling a good idea? Is there a better way?

The rationale for drilling in the Refuge is to find a domestic oil supply, income for Alaska, and profit for private firms. The debate focuses on the environmental cost, the human rights of the threatened Gwich‘in people, and opposition from Canada, which shares the migratory wildlife. Yet that energy-vs.-environment debate overlooks important reasons why drilling in the Arctic Refuge would not improve but compromise national energy security and economic vitality, especially when compared with alternatives that benefit both and improve the environment.

FOLLOW THE MONEY First, the economics of drilling for Refuge oil look as unrewarding as its politics. For the oil industry to invest, the Refuge must hold a lot of oil, and the oil must sell for a high enough price for long enough to recover costs and earn profits. When drilling was last proposed in the Refuge, in 1987, the Interior Department tried to boost its case by assuming tax breaks that no longer existed, twice actual oil prices, and twice the likelihood of finding twice the oil that Alaska's state geologist forecast from more complete data.

Despite this generous handicapping, Interior had to admit (in the fine print) that the odds were 5:1 against finding any economically recoverable oil, 15:1 against finding as much as six months' national supply, and over 100:1 against another huge Prudhoe Bay-sized find. Independent analysts using realistic assumptions later found that the expected reserves would be closer to six days' national supply and that the producers would lose money. The only point of agreement was that the Refuge's biological core, its small but critical Coastal Plain, would be trashed.

In 1998, the U.S. Geological Survey did an honest and modern update. It found worse geology, offset by new, fourfold cheaper production technologies. The 1987 estimated average reserve of 3.2 billion barrels of oil could probably still be profitably recovered—if, for decades to come, it fetched an average price of at least $22 a barrel (in December 2000 dollars, delivered to Los Angeles). Historic world oil prices FOB Saudi Arabia have broken the $22 mark only a few times in the past three decades, and tend toward the teens. Sustaining $22+ a barrel for decades would contradict practically every industry and government forecast—and the forecasts are trending down, not up.

The Alaska Department of Revenue earnestly hopes for Refuge drilling so its citizens will keep getting rebates instead of paying income taxes. Yet in December 2000, the Department projected a steady decline in the L.A. price of Alaskan crude oil to less than $13 a barrel in 2009. The latest Federal forecast calls for oil to stay below $22 until nearly 2020; when Alaska last published such a forecast in 1998, it was only $18. That means less economically recoverable oil. Indeed, the USGS says that below $16 (plus any lease fee paid to the Treasury), no economically recoverable oil is likely to be found. Alaska now forecasts prices below $16 throughout 2005– 10, so why drill?

Of course, any forecast of oil prices can be wrong, and most are. Oil prices have fluctuated randomly for at least 115 years. Oil companies routinely assess that risk—though in the Refuge, it's not simply a business decision but also a choice about such public goods as environment and national energy security. But some fundamentals can cut through the forecasting fog.

Astounding advances continue in the technology of finding and extracting oil—supercomputer visualization like X-ray eyes, and precision-guided drilling to snake between pockets of oil. Oil resources, both domestic and global, have therefore stopped declining and started expanding markedly, halving Federal forecasts of 2020 oil prices—now only two-fifths of what Interior assumed in 1987.

Could that new technology tip the economics back in favor of Refuge oil? Most industry experts think not. The more they look at their proprietary Refuge data, the more it seems a multi-billion-dollar gamble not worth taking. That's because the same technological advances that might make Refuge oil worth seeking can also be applied elsewhere. Oil exploration is a global business. With oil everywhere getting rapidly cheaper to find and lift, why look in one of the most hostile and remote places on earth? Practically anywhere else would be cheaper.

During 1998–99, while oil prices soared from $10 to $25 a barrel, the big U.S. energy companies slashed their exploration budgets by 38% worldwide, 66% in onshore America. They see technology becoming ever more powerful, oil more abundant, and long-term prices ever lower, so only the lowest-cost provinces can compete—not drilling above the Arctic Circle. If oil companies believed in high long-term oil prices, they'd be drilling everywhere. They're not.

DEPENDENCE ON OPEC OIL? The second rationale for drilling in the Refuge—relieving dependence on OPEC oil—has also waned. OPEC's percentage of the oil the U.S. imports has dropped by a third since the high-water-mark of imports in 1977. Only one-fourth of U.S. oil now comes from OPEC. Most imports come from more stable Western sources, and are so diversified that a full-scale war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 caused no gas lines at home. We're not as dependent on OPEC as some imply.

Nor are we short of fuels. A White House aide on January 21 provoked merriment in energy circles by claiming that Arctic Refuge drilling was urgent because, as California's electricity crisis showed, the nation "desperately needs more fuel." How much of California's electricity is in fact made from oil? One percent. Of the nation's electricity? Two to three percent. How much of the nation's oil makes electricity? Two percent. California isn't short of fuel. What California is short of is cheap electricity.

If oil-import dependence or oil shortages were a serious problem, though, would the solution to domestic depletion be to deplete faster? Or might other solutions arrive sooner and cost less? If Arctic Refuge oil isn't the cheapest way to provide the services now provided by imported oil, then drilling in the Refuge will make the oil-import problem worse than it could have been. That's because each dollar spent on the costly option could have bought more of the cheap option instead. Choosing the costlier option therefore results in using and importing more oil than if we'd bought the best buys first.

EFFICIENCY: ENERGY WITHOUT RISK Better buys aren't hard to find. In fact, we've already bought a lot of them, though far more remain untapped. Specifically, the past quarter-century's efficiency revolution is now "producing" over four times as much energy as the entire domestic oil industry (and ten times the oil the U.S. imports from the Persian Gulf) simply by using less energy to do more work in smarter ways. More than half the nation's energy services now come from efficient use. Each barrel of oil supports three-quarters more GDP than it did in 1975—and that's just for starters.

Efficiency doesn't risk dry holes. It protects the climate and improves the environment. It will never suffer a terrorist attack. It creates a uniquely flexible and perennially profitable form of all- American energy security. In fact, it cut oil imports from the Persian Gulf by 87% during 1976–85 alone. Yet efficiency is strangely invisible in today's Refuge-oil debate.

The energy policies of the early '70s and the mid-1980s painfully demonstrated how quickly energy gluts happen when customers seek efficiency. Even relatively small efficiency gains offer an enormous potential opportunity to policymakers and entrepreneurs—but a serious risk to energy producers and investors.

The early 1980s saw a two-pronged approach to energy: the government increased supply while customers increased efficiency. Both efforts succeeded—supply modestly, efficiency beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Between 1979 and 1986, GDP rose by 20 percent while the nation's total energy use fell by 5½ percent. This stuck the suppliers with costly new supplies without the revenue to pay for them. The resulting energy glut crashed energy prices in 1986, sending many producers into insolvency. Efficiency providers suffered too: as attention waned, many energy-saving programs, products, and services faded from view for the next 14 years.

Yet in the last four of those years (1996–99), almost unnoticed, efficiency unexpectedly came back. Despite record-low and falling energy prices, the pace of U.S. energy savings averaged 3.2 percent per year—nearly matching its early-1980s all-time peak when energy prices were at record highs and rising. Meanwhile, a cluster of random events caused routine blips in oil and natural gas prices just as California's botched restructuring sent Western electricity prices soaring. Those triple price hikes will further accelerate energy efficiency's late-1990s revival.

All this sets the stage for a rerun of a very bad movie—the 1986 price crash that ruined so many energy producers. That crash was caused by mixing two ingredients: an underlying efficiency trend plus a Federal supply stimulus. The first ingredient is now here; the second is promised by President Bush. There's no reason to expect a result different from the past couple of times we've tried the same recipe. The light at the end of the energy tunnel is an oncoming train. The resulting wreck will not be healthy for the domestic energy industries, whose financial stability is an important element of national energy security.

As in the early 1980s, supply expansions will be far less prompt and effective than energy efficiency. This is especially true for Refuge oil, which can produce nothing for nearly a decade anyway, and then, briefly, about one percent of the world's oil. Efficiency, however, is such a vast resource that capturing just a few percent of it could crash the oil price and displace any oil that might lurk beneath the Refuge.

AUTOMOBILE POTENTIAL Let's suppose that a compliant Congress, steady high oil prices, and successful exploration did find the hoped-for 3.2 billion barrels of profitably recoverable oil beneath the Refuge. Over a typical 30-year field life, that averages 292,000 barrels per day, enough to produce about 156,000 barrels of gasoline per day. That would run just two percent of America's present fleet of cars and light (non-commercial) trucks. That much gasoline could be saved by making those vehicles a mere 0.4 mpg more efficient. During 1979–85, new light vehicles gained 0.4 mpg every five months. This trend ended when President Reagan rolled back the efficiency standards—thereby wasting one Refuge's worth of oil, and promptly doubling oil imports from the Persian Gulf. Had the efficiency trend continued, America wouldn't have needed a drop of oil from the Gulf since 1985.

Even with no improvement in vehicle efficiency, just adopting aftermarket tires as efficient as the originals would save several Refuges' worth of oil. So would equipping appropriate U.S. buildings with superwindows, like the 1983 models that have let us harvest 27 banana crops inside RMI's headquarters with no furnace. Superwindows also make buildings more comfortable and cheaper to construct. These are just two examples of hundreds of available efficiency options. In 1989, RMI added up all the main U.S. efficiency options then available (automobiles, buildings, industries—everything). The total was equivalent nowadays to 54 Refuges' worth of oil, at one-sixth the cost.

MOBILITY WITHOUT OIL New technologies for saving energy are creating opportunities faster than the old ones are used up—just like the technologies of finding and extracting oil, only faster. Energy efficiency is outpacing oil production so quickly that even cheap oil is simply becoming uncompetitive. In the not too distant future, we won't need expensive oil because oil, for the most part, won't be in demand. That's especially likely because the biggest efficiency gains are now targeted at oil's biggest user—cars.

The average new American car last year might have been the highest expression of the Iron Age, but its 24-mpg efficiency rating tied for a 20-year low. The auto industry can do better, and is starting to. Briskly selling hybrid-electric cars now include a Corolla-class 48- mpg five-seater and a CRX-class 67-mpg two-seater. An American light vehicle fleet as efficient as those Toyota Priuses or Honda Insights would respectively save gasoline equivalent to the average output of 26 or 33 Refuges' worth of crude oil.

General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler have already tested family sedans that achieve 72–80 mpg, now headed towards production. For those who prefer small city cars, VW is already selling a 78-mpg model in Europe and plans a 2003 version at around 235 mpg (not a typo). Beyond such straightforward improvements are the stunning advances in fuel-cell cars, now slated for 2003–05 production by eight mainstream automakers. The chairs of four major oil companies have already acknowledged the start of the oil endgame and the dawning of the Hydrogen Age.

By combining fuel cells with sleek, carbon-fiber body materials, the start-up company Hypercar, Inc. has designed a spacious, uncompromised concept car that offers everything you'd find in a midsize sport utility vehicle, but uses 82% less fuel. (For more on Hypercar, Inc., see page 4.) A full 1999 U.S. fleet of such efficient vehicles would save 42 Refuges' worth of oil. Ultimately, globally, they'd save all the oil OPEC now sells.

Hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles could also serve as portable power stations. A full fleet of them, when parked (about 96% of the time), would have enough generating capacity to displace the world's coal and nuclear power plants 5–10 times over. They could help pay for themselves through electricity sales, while halting up to two- thirds of climate change. As fuel-cell pioneer Geoffrey Ballard, Shell Hydrogen CEO Don Huberts, and ex-Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Yamani successively remarked, the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the Oil Age will not end because the world runs out of oil.

THE INSECURITY OF NORTH SLOPE OIL A further argument for drilling in the Refuge has been to make full use of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), likely to keep running at half-capacity through at least 2008 as declining Prudhoe Bay output is offset by new oil from other North Slope fields outside the Refuge. If you'd spent $8 billion (in 1977 dollars) for an 800- mile-long, four-foot diameter pipe over some of the most rugged terrain on the planet, you'd want to see it kept busy for as long as possible too. But that business logic compromises national energy security. In 1981, we authored a study for the Pentagon called Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security, which concluded that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was among the gravest threats to U.S. energy security. It still is, and Refuge oil would make it more so.

TAPS' operator notes with pride that "without this vital link...the entire nation would be affected." All too true, alas: TAPS carries 18% of domestic oil. And if its flow were redoubled with Refuge oil, it would bring about as much oil to American refineries as the Strait of Hormuz does now. But of these two chokepoints, TAPS is worse: it has no alternative route, and is easy to disrupt but hard to fix. Disruption of any key point in midwinter, when it can't be mended, would cause its waxy oil, over some weeks, to cool, stop flowing, and congeal into a nine-million-barrel, 800-mile-long candle.

The pipeline has uniquely vulnerable facilities at both ends. In between, over half its length is aboveground, accessible, and (says the Army) indefensible. It's already been tampered with, shot at, and bombed twice but incompetently. (The Oklahoma City and USS Cole bombers were busy elsewhere.) A technician accidentally blew up a non- critical pumping station in 1979. Why on earth would the United States want to create another Strait of Hormuz? One is quite enough.

TAPS'S RETIREMENT PLAN? Even if a kinder, gentler world were assured, TAPS's clock is still ticking. The 23-year-old pipeline—now well into middle age and nearing its originally intended retirement age—hasn't aged gracefully. Corrosion, erosion, and the sheer stress of pumping gooier oil are taking their toll. Accidents seem to be rising. Last April, a pressure hammer moved the pipe 23 inches, a serious event that went unnoticed for almost a month. In July, a quarter-ton, four- feet-across, two-inch-thick steel valve ring was stretched into an oval by accidentally being dragged through the pipeline for 400 miles. Then, in October, unsupervised workers set off a spark that could easily have blown up the Valdez oil terminal at the pipeline's south end.

Federal studies of TAPS's maintenance and life expectancy will guide possible renewal of its original 30-year permits, due to expire in 2004. But Refuge oil couldn't start flowing until nearly 2010. By the time it peaked in 2030–40, the pipeline would be 53–63 years old. When Refuge oil tapered off, the pipeline would be nearing its centenary. Does this sound like a prudent way to deliver something supposedly so vital to national security?

When scrutinized from every perspective besides environment—energy security, economic fundamentals, technological advance, the financial soundness of the domestic energy industry—Arctic Refuge oil is a risk the nation can't afford. Its benefits could be achieved by tapping just a few percent of the proven energy efficiency reserves—the cheaper, faster alternatives that are becoming the market success stories of the 21st Century. These alternatives offer economic security and competitive advantage, immunity to price shocks and supply manipulations, and environmental benefits rather than costs.

If any oil exists under the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, its best, safest, and most economic use will be forever holding up the ground under America's last great wildland.

-- John Fritz (aeon30@hotmail.com), April 09, 2001.

I have only one tiny problem with Seraphima's post. There is an incredible assumption that the corporate big wigs actually know what they are doing. These are the same people who told us just last year that the NYSE would reach 20,000 and the NASDAQ would reach 6,000 because there was no end in sight to our blossoming consumer-oriented economy. Guess what happened to THEIR stock portfolios?

And BTW - there has already been an attempt to fill tankers with fresh water from the Great Lakes and sell it on the world market. ALL the governors of the Great Lake states got together and said NO!

Craig

-- Craig Miller (cmiller@ssd.com), April 10, 2001.