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Drilling in ANWR: What's Not to Like?

What's not to like is:

a) The enormous expense and energy of developing ANWR is diverting us from the vital task of getting off our oil addiction and developing our renewable energy resources. Until we move in this direction, we will continue to be at the mercy of middle eastern oil producers and get sucked into more bankrupting overseas military fiascos.

b) Even in the best-case scenario, ANWR oil won't get to the consumer for more than a decade from now; other energy sources can be tapped much more quickly.

c) While it is not yet perfectly clear what the effect on our global climate and local weather patterns will be, and while there are of course natural cycles of climate change, it makes no sense to imagine that humans injecting massive greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning oil and coal aren't having a significant impact on the global atmospheric and ecological systems. In fact, if natural cycles are warming the earth now anyway, it is even MORE urgent for us not to exacerbate the problem by burning more oil.

d) Quite possibly even more alarming than climate change is the acidification of the world's oceans, as a direct result of the rapid rise in CO2 in the atmosphere. The impact on the oceans' primary productivity is drastic and may result in a collapse of that vital food resource around the world.

e) it is insane to be using up our precious remaining oil reserves (that are relatively easy to get at and affordable to extract) by burning them, both in the internal combustion engine and for heating. Other sources of energy -- generated from renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and wave -- can serve those purposes admirably. We should be saving our oil for uses for which there aren't easy substitutes, such as petrochemicals, plastics, and the myriad other products that have become essential in our modern technological economy.

f) A national crash program to develop our vast domestic renewable energy resources would be a terrific stimulus to the US economy. We could put to beneficial use America's legendary abilities to innovate and adapt to change, become a world leader in an industry with huge export potential, win back much of the admiration of the rest of the world that we have squandered under the current administration, and more or less save the world to boot. Only our flat-earth mindset is standing in the way.