Hacker News Reader

Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

ANWR, A place few people have ever set foot, let alone seen, including environmentalist from a distance. Meanwhile the state has an unemployment rate of about 7%, and a lot of people depend on the revenue from the sale of oil to live. I say drill. Alaska isn’t the place you’re going to see Amazon build a warehouse, at least let them have something.

View on HN

If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other inhabitants, the humans should move. If my choice is between a polar bear or a town in Alaska, I'll pick the polar bear anytime and move the town. We don't need to turn every corner of the planet into a place serving our immediate human needs. In fact we've already done that to too many places and are ruining the planet for everyone while doing so.

On top of that we shouldn't be drilling for oil anywhere. We likely have already turned the planet into a uninhabitable wasteland by burning too many fossil fuels. We need to have a hard cut on our fossil fuel dependence and not sorry it further.

> If Alaska isn't a good place to live for humans but great for other inhabitants, the humans should move.

The indigenous populations in the Arctic are often very poor. Who is going to pay for them to move to Ft. Lauderdale, or even as far as Juneau? House them, find them jobs, etc?

"Just move" is a non-solution also offered up for pretty much every factory closing in the rust belt, coal miners in WV, etc. It vastly overestimates the mobility of many families, especially those near or in poverty.

That said, Prudhoe Bay has double the national unemployment rate, so I don't buy the argument that drilling is a magical answer to unemployment. (And we should stop burning stuff for energy)

The reality is that the oil companies usually hire non-natives. They'll make big promises to the communities though before a project so that no one makes waves. Haven't yet heard of a case where they delivered the jobs to the native communities that were promised.

Agreed! That's a huge, but somewhat separate problem. I'm more than happy to pay for UBI of it leads to happier people and a healthier planet in this case. I don't think there is a way around it if automation continues to improve.

Paying for people to move is a lot cheaper than climate change.

The choice isn’t between drilling oil in Alaska and everyone transitioning to alternative energy. It’s between drilling oil in Alaska and buying it from regimes that murder dissidents and sometimes deny basic rights to women.

You make the implicit assumption that there is no option of using less oil. And while that might be true this week, there is no reason why we can not use much less oil in a year or a decade.

You can, and indeed should, do both. In fact, simultaneously reducing demand and increasing supply is what will hurt these regimes the most.

Why not use less oil?

So what’s your plan to reduce oil consumption to the point of applying broad economic sanctions against every autocratic oil regime including Russia and Saudi Arabia, and how soon can you implement that? I guarantee you can implement it a lot faster if you replace that oil production from those regimes with added oil production from democratic oil-producing countries like the US and Canada.

Why limit ourselves to economic sanctions? The future of the entire planet is at stake. This is the equivalent of an all out military attack by a foreign power.

Given that we're barreling towards environmental collapse, lowering Alaska's unemployment rate by a fraction of a percent or encouraging more lower 48 people to move there might not be our highest priority. High arctic industrial operations also contribute to albedo changes from soot settling on the ice. Intact ecosystems have value now and for generations to come. To destroy them because they're not overrun with tourists is incredibly anthropocentric.

They have freedom of movement. Unlike quite a lot of people on earth.

Yeah you're right, the only value of vast swaths of untouched nature is to be looked at.

All these people moved to Alaska because of oil and now they're addicted to it. Sad really. Hopefully an income tax will cause some sort of exodus. A smaller population can be sustained on tourism and fishing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com