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Tang is a second-year student majoring in political science.

By Eric Tang

Several weeks ago, I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat in a packed lecture hall in Washington, D.C. In the front of the room patiently stood the very small man with a dark gray beard and wonderfully amiable face whom hundreds of us had come to see.

The event I flew across the country to participate in was ECOnference 2001, a massive student environmentalist conference, and the tiny man standing in front was Lenny Kohm, a photojournalist and conservationist who has been fighting to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for the last 14 years.

Kohm, who insists upon being called Lenny, was about to begin his 1,813th and final showing of his beautiful and telling slide show presentation “The Last Great Wilderness Project.” Lenny created the slide show to educate people about the threats by the oil industry to despoil one of last pristine frontiers on Earth and to urge us all to fight for its permanent protection.

For those of you who do not know, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the last place in North America where the full spectrum of arctic life is protected in one seamless expanse. It is a remarkably beautiful and precious ecosystem that is home to a copious array of wildlife including polar bears, caribou, wolves, seals and eagles. The Arctic Refuge is also the homeland for an indigenous tribe known as the Gwinch’in, who have depended on this region and its inhabitants for 20,000 years.

Unfortunately, several large oil companies want to invade this pristine wilderness area and drill. They want to destroy one of the most incredible places on Earth for about six months worth of oil. Drilling in the Arctic Refuge for oil would be like damming up the Grand Canyon for hydroelectric power or plugging up Old Faithful for geothermal power.

Nevertheless, the oil companies are relentless in their pursuit of profit. Having bought the firm support of several politicians like Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the oil industry has shown that it will stop at nothing to see that the Arctic is opened for drilling.

An amendment allowing drilling was a part of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy bill which passed the Republican-controlled House. During America’s energy crisis over the summer, many proponents of drilling in the Arctic claimed that extracting the oil from this region would assuage our energy woes. Since the tragedies of Sept. 11, there have been claims that drilling in the Arctic is a matter of “national security” since it would decrease our dependence on foreign oil.

What proponents of these arguments fail to mention is that the oil from the Arctic would take at least 10 years to arrive at the pump. I fail to see how six months’ supply of oil, 10 years from now, will solve any of our present energy shortages or will increase our national security.

What makes the idea of drilling in the Arctic such a profoundly horrible idea is that there are so many better alternatives. If we simply raised the fuel-efficiency standards of cars and light trucks to 40 miles per gallon, we would save 3 million barrels of oil per day, reduce carbon dioxide pollution by 600 million tons per year, and save consumers $45 billion dollars each year at the gas pump. Additionally, clean, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power could satisfy a large percentage of our energy needs without harming our environment or our public health.

Some people argue that, while great in theory, renewable energy sources are too expensive. I am not confident that this is true for all renewable energy sources. In some places the prices of renewables are at least competitive with nuclear and fossil fuels and are becoming cheaper every year. However, even given that the claim of its large expense is true, what most people fail to recognize are all the external costs of the production and consumption of fossil fuels which are not included when you pay your energy bill or buy a gallon of gasoline at the pump.

What oil and energy companies are not made to pay for are all the costs of environmental destruction caused by the extraction of the fossil fuels. Nor are they made to pay for all the health costs of the people who suffer from asthma or emphysema as a result of the air pollution caused by fossil fuel emissions. Nor are they made to pay for their contributions to climate change via the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Perhaps, greatest of all, taxpayers like you and I are made to pay billions of dollars annually to maintain a military presence protecting our investments in foreign oil.

If oil and energy companies were made to internalize these costs, the true costs of fossil fuel use would show everybody that clean, renewable energy sources (which have little to no negative externalities) are not only the environmental but also the economic solution to our energy needs.

Furthermore, despite all the appalling problems associated with fossil fuel use, each year our government subsidizes these corporations with billions of dollars to assure that they can continue to pollute our air, destroy our wilderness areas, put our troops in danger, and all the while remain some of the wealthiest companies on Earth. Of course, the oil companies are always kind enough to give some of that money back to the politicians during election years via campaign contributions.

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