Letters to the Editor: Wildlife conservation is pointless without taking on the fossil fuel industry
I hope and pray that someday the government finds a way to stop it. (From the Associated Press), Washington (CNN) – Last week, we learned that Exxon Mobil and others were planning to drill for the first time in the Arctic to tap the vast oil reserves underneath the world’s largest island: Tuktoyaktuk, the smallest municipality in Canada’s Northwest Territories. In the news brief, the AP reported, “The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Marine Conservation Council, a trade group representing the Alaska natural and mining industries, says the area contains at least 1.2 billion barrels of oil in place.”
A short while later, the American Petroleum Institute, the oil company trade organization, released a new forecast from its own report, “America’s Petroleum Supply and Demand: Outlook 2000 through 2020.” The report projects the U.S. to become more dependent on foreign oil in the next 45 years if the nation does not reduce consumption, increase production, and use other energy sources.
This report was supposed to have been the “wake-up” call for President Clinton, but he missed it. He is currently in the midst of a long-sought policy reform, which he has yet to achieve. In his recent budget proposal to Congress, he has proposed spending $2.4 billion to address global warming. This funding is one of the first major measures of global warming policy to come from the Clinton administration.
The report from the AP, in its press release last week, stated that the global warming will result in “drastic” changes in the Arctic region, “including the loss of sea ice, shrinking fish stocks and the loss of the fragile Arctic ecosystem.” The report projected that “if greenhouse gases continue to grow unchecked through the 21st century, Arctic oil production will drop by 15 to 40 percent in five years; this result has the potential to make the Arctic the next major oil producer.”
While the report from the AP does make it sound like the effects of global warming
