21 Dec 2005

ANWR Drilling Blocked by Senate

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The goofballs in the US Senate again blocked oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Tara Sweeney explains what oil exploration means to her people, the Inupiaq Inuit who live there.

Right now, it’s 30 below zero in Kaktovik, the only village within the entire 19.6 million acres of the federally recognized boundaries of ANWR. It is total 24-hour darkness, and the wind is howling. Beyond the little houses, there is flat frozen ocean and tundra for as far as the eye can see. Stretching 1000 miles from the Barents Sea near Siberia in the west, to the Canadian border in the east, the Arctic Coastal Plain is one of the harshest climates in the world. Only the strongest people survive.

The PURE LUXURY of running water, flush toilets, local schools, local health care clinics, police and fire stations, were unavailable prior to the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, America’s largest oil field, 90 miles to the west. Kaktovik was the last community on Alaska’s North Slope to get these wondrous things, courtesy of tax revenue from oil operations at Prudhoe Bay.

What would Americans in the Lower 48 States do if they were denied these basic necessities? They’d scream bloody murder!

Yet these are the basic amenities that radical environmentalists of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society say the Inupiat Eskimo people should be denied.

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John Hinderaker of Power Line asks:

It’s a funny thing: when the Democrats are in the majority, the Democrats run Congress. When the Republicans are in the majority, the Democrats still run Congress. How does that work?

Maybe if we get lucky, the democrats will nail Bill Frist with that phony scandal they’ve been working on, and get rid of him for us.

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One Feedback on "ANWR Drilling Blocked by Senate"

Clia Toris IV

My response to: The Wisdom of Arctic Oil – The Luxury of Running Water by Tara Sweeney

The crazy thing is if we would have started drilling under their igloos – they wouldn’t have known what we were doing anyway. Remember these are people who, until very recently, used whale blubber, caribou meat and seal fur as currency. Who is claiming they’re owed something? Tara Sweeney- right wing stoolie? It’s not them telling us we owe them, it’s us telling them we owe them. Call it white man’s guilt or, if you’re a liberal politician, come up with something more politically correct to call it. Either way it’s ridiculous. Here is another analogy – to the Indians of the great plains (circa 1870): Relax we don’t want your buffalo (number one food and material source) we just need your South Dakota uranium. Do we really owe them? Did they have a practical use for uranium anyway? Catch my drift?
Oh, Hmmm, I get it. We don’t really feel like we owe them shit. We just want to pretend we do. It’s a sympathy play. Who is against poor Indians living in poverty? Not me.
Wait a minute. Just imagine that these really are real Indians jumping up and down on an ice flow chanting, “exploit us, exploit us, exploit us!” We ought to give them what they want you say?
Beads for Manhattan? If you would have polled the Manhattan Indians around 1680 they would have insisted up and down that they got a fair shake. Arctic drilling as reparations? I’m not sure if it’s a conservative or liberal argument. No one told the Inuits that they had to permanently settle and stay around the Arctic circle. Plenty of their relatives headed a lot further south after they migrated over the Bering Sea thousands of years ago. It’s hard to feel sorry for them. Hey, life’s a bitch anywhere above the 60th parallel. Certainly, it’s difficult to make an argument supporting Arctic drilling on their behalf. Surely, someone can come up with something better. Call me (email me – you know what I mean) when you do. In the mean time…



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