Say Anything Blog

Tony Long, blogging for Wired magazine, has an embarrassingly naive post up about the Alyeska Pipeline, which was funded by private oil companies and was completed in 1977.  Long tries to cast the pipeline as some sort of massive blunder and then use it as evidence against expansion of oil production on the North Slope.

He starts thusly:

1977: The 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline System is completed.

The Alaskan pipeline, built to help slake America’s insatiable thirst for oil, was designed to move oil from the fertile fields of the North Slope to Valdez, Alaska’s northernmost ice-free port.

He’s off to a bad start.  If Long is using “fertile” to describe the fact that the North Slope is oil-rich, then he’s right.  That area is oil-rich.  But “fertile” isn’t the right word, because oil doesn’t exactly grow.  I think Long is using the word to imply that the North Slope is some sort of a natural wonderland.  While I’ll not deny that the arctic has some majestic scenery (I was born and raised in Alaska), the North Slope area is primarily a barren, frozen wasteland.  A desert, if you will, except cold and frozen instead of hot and dry.

Long goes downhill from here:

The pipeline was an engineering marvel, considering the terrain that had to be negotiated: three mountain ranges and numerous rivers and streams stood between all those thirsty SUVs and their sustenance. The project, which was privately funded, cost $8 billion.

Someone might want to inform this guy that while early forerunners of the SUV were on the market in 1977, it wasn’t until the mid-1990’s that the SUV became prominent among vehicles owned by Americans.  While I wasn’t alive in 1977, let alone driving cars, I seem to remember the era as one where economy vehicles were more prominent than anything else what with the fuel shortages of that era.

Regardless, the Alyeska Pipeline wasn’t built to fuel the SUV’s of suburban soccer moms.  It was built because America’s economy was growing causing demand for oil to be up at a time when foreign producers (OPEC) were putting the squeeze on us by cutting production.  We needed oil or our economy was going to collapse, so we used the oil within our borders.

Not so nefarious when we eschew snooty, naive snark in favor of fact now is it?

Long finally blunders his way to his point, which is that expanding domestic oil production is bad because once in the thirty years of the pipeline’s operation there was a major tanker spill:

Since turning on the spigot on June 20, 1977, more than 14 billion barrels of oil have flowed to the storage tanks at Valdez. The ARCO Juneau was the first tanker to carry crude through Prince William Sound. Around 20,000 ships have made the trip since, most notoriously the Exxon Valdez, which ran aground in 1989, spilling roughly 11 million tons of oil and causing one of the worst ecological disasters in U.S. history.

The effects of that catastrophe are still being felt to this day, which hasn’t stopped the Bush administration from pushing to open more oil fields at the North Slope for exploration and exploitation.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was, without a doubt, a disaster.  But one of the worst ecological disasters in US history?  Please.  One of the most hyped, maybe, but the fallout was hardly as bad as it’s made to sound here.  Within a year there was no real way to tell that there had even been a massive oil spill along the coast, and while wildlife in the area was impacted (lots of animals died immediately), the long-term fallout has been negligible.  I should know.  I’ve fished in Prince William Sound dozens of times since the spill.  I’ve fished right over Bly Reef, as a matter of fact, where the Exxon Valdez was run aground.  Everything is fine there now, and has been for some time.

All told, it was a terrible mistake that had no long-term consequences.  And, again, in 30 years of operation it has been the only disaster in the pipeline’s history.  There have been other issues with leaks and such, sure, but the history of the pipeline is one of largely efficient, error-free operation.  Instead of being an argument against oil exploration on the North Slope, this is an argument in favor of it.

People like Long need to be asked why the rest of us should shoulder the burden of needlessly expensive gasoline just to pander to their sense of ecological paranoia.