Say Anything Blog

The headline doesn’t read “Bush Gives Oil Company Right To Expand Oil Production In Alaska,” which would be welcome news to Americans struggling with high gas prices.  Instead, the headline reads ”Companies Get OK to Annoy Polar Bears.” Because that’s the fair perspective on this story, right?

Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas.

The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if “small numbers” of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by their activities over the next five years.

Environmentalists said the new regulations give oil companies a blank check to harass the polar bear.

So it sounds like the oil companies just got the right to do whatever they heck they want up north and slaughter any polar bears that get in their way.  Except, according to information that doesn’t even come close to support the inflammatory nature of the AP’s headline and opening paragraphs, this isn’t the case at all:

About 2,000 of the 25,000 polar bears in the Arctic live in and around the Chukchi Sea, where the government in February auctioned off oil leases to ConocoPhillips Co., Shell Oil Co. and five other companies for $2.6 billion. Over objections from environmentalists and members of Congress, the sale occurred before the bear was classified as threatened in May.

Exploring in the Chukchi Sea’s 29.7 million acres will require as many as five drill ships, one or two icebreakers, a barge, a tug and two helicopter flights per day, according to the government. Oil companies will also be making hundred of miles of ice roads and trails along the coastline.

“The oil and gas industry is operating under the kind of rules they have operated under for 15 years has not been a threat to the species,” H. Dale Hall, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s director, told The Associated Press on Friday. “It was the ice melting and the habitat going away that was a threat to the species over everything else.”

To sum up:

• The area the oil companies will be working in are home to just 10% of the overall polar bear population.
• This area that is open to oil exploration consists of 29.7 million acres, which works out to approximately 14,850 acres per polar bear.  I think the oil companies won’t have too hard of a time staying out of the polar bears’ way.

• The oil companies will be operating under the same rules as they have been for the lat 15 years.  Rules that haven’t exactly resulted in a polar bear holocaust.

Unfortunately, people just skimming this article and its headline are going to get the idea that oil companies will soon be in the great white north chasing around polar bears with their trucks and ATV’s.  The truth is that the oil companies will be allowed to exploit domestic sources of petroleum to meet our country’s ever-increasing demand for it, and they’ll be doing so in the same sort of responsible manner as they have for the past several decades.

Meaning that, once again, the truth isn’t what the media would have you think it is.