The oil flows more slowly, the climate changes more quickly
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe camping party was brought to this northern tundra by a bush plane, tossed around like a wiffle ball as it flew over the craggy peaks of the Brooks Range. Bulbous bush tyres bounced along a gravel riverbed; conservationists, a handful of amateur explorers and their paraphernalia were unloaded and left alone on the North Slope.
A visitor sees this expanse as wilderness; indigenous people who have lived here for millennia would call it home. Climate science sees it as the retreating edge of the cryosphere, the part of the planet which is frozen. Federal law calls it the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska . In Alaska land, ice and oil stack neatly one over the other. In the courts they come into conflict.
If, from a small tent in an awesome expanse, Alaska looks like a window to the past, it is also a preview of what is to come. Fights over where and how much to drill are set to intensify around the world as demand for oil persists and concerns about energy security climb. At the same time the impacts of climate change are becoming ever more evident as the rest of the world follows Alaska into the thawed-out and fiery greenhouse future.
Not to be outdone by the drawers of water, the high-priests of fire had designs on the land as well. In 1958 the scientists and functionaries of the Atomic Energy Commission’s “Project Plowshare” suggested detonating a series of nuclear bombs on the shore of the Chukchi Sea in order to create a new harbour.
The Rampart dam would have created a reservoir ten times the volume of Lake Nasser...with an area nearly as large as Belgium Environmentalists stood at right angles to that alignment. In 1970 the initial environmental-impact report filed for—just eight pages long—had immediately been challenged in the courts and the challenges had kept coming. But the Arab oil embargo in the autumn of 1973 sealed their fate. By November Richard Nixon had signed an act exempting the pipeline from further environmental review.
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