The Plunder of Alaska

...By authorizing an increase in the production from offshore wells and letting in additional Canadian oil, the President in one stroke added up to 500,000 barrels a day to the U.S...

...We have seen this pristine land before: the United States at its birth two centuries ago...

...His articles have appeared in Harper's, New YoHc, and the Columbia Journalism Review...

...The orderly, planned development of these and other industries like fishing and tourism would impinge on the sensitive Alaskan environment infinitely less than would the extraction of oil, and at the same time provide a firm economic foundation for a population unlikely to exceed half a million by the end of the century...

...What RICHARD POLLAK, formerly an associate editor of Newsweek, has written widely on public affairs...

...But with the intelligent reordering of fiscal and scientific priorities, a viable, efficient, inexpensive, and cleaner alternative to oil should not be far off...

...The discovery of oil," warns Dr...

...In determining the world's weather, no single land mass plays a more critical role than the arctic ice pack...

...But having already sunk more than $2 billion in Alaska without realizing a penny so far, the oil companies are hardly about to pack up their rigs...

...magnetohy-drodynamics, the generation of electricity from a supersonic flow of hot ionized gases...

...If we can get to the moon...

...Such willful pollution has long been routine tanker practice, playing no small part in what French oceanogra-pher Jacques-Yves Cousteau regards as the cause of death of forty per cent of the world's sea life...

...The impact of this pollution—past, present, and potential—is as clear as the sea is not...

...Alaska may contribute only a small percentage to the U.S...

...To date, thousands of waterfowl have lost the slimy battle of Cook Inlet...

...not once was it suggested that motor fuel might become scarce, a fact that reflects the industry's devotion to that highly profitable product and the super-polluter it feeds, the internal combustion engine...

...Such a settlement might be put off for years if opponents of the pipeline can mount a sustained counteroffensive against the oil lobby...

...They argue, for example, that Alaska desperately needs the industry because it is a "poor" state...

...Beyond nuclear energy, scientists now are experimenting with several new power possibilities, among them: superconductivity, the transmission of electricity through hyper-cooled conduits without resistance or loss...

...Much research remains, of course, and new environmental problems (such as thermal pollution from nuclear power plants) will doubtless arise...

...In his analysis of the problem, economist Tussing quite correctly points out that no oil is likely to flow to market from the North Slope until a package settlement is agreed upon by the oil companies, the natives, the state and Federal Governments, and the conservationists...

...And, given Canada's vast oil reserves and relatively small population (twenty-one million), its exportable surplus will likely grow markedly in the next decade...

...These exports, along with existing reserves and the enormous amounts of untapped shale oil in the United States, leave the nation nowhere near the precarious position so dear to the oil company propagandists...

...For long little more than a colony dependent on Washington for more than $1 of every $2 spent within its borders, Alaska suffers the nation's highest unemployment rate and its native Aleuts, Eskimos, and Indians (one-fifth the total state population of 304,000) are likely the poorest citizens in the United States...

...and even if the industry were to add new safeguards, thousands more will die, along with king crab, salmon, and, unless the spillage ends, the entire biota of the inlet...

...Excusing it here on the ground that Alaska is poor is like telling an Eskimo he can have a refrigerator if he will allow oil drills to obliterate his hunting grounds...

...As Alaskan economist Arlon R. Tussing explained at a Department of Interior hearing not long ago, "The anticipated rate of return to [oil companies working the Slope] would be forty-three per cent," Even should the cost of the pipeline double, Tussing maintained, the returns would still approach thirty-six per cent...

...As for the state's 57,000 natives, they live in squalid villages not because funds are lacking to help them but because, like all dark-skinned Americans in our history, they have been systematically exploited and mistreated...

...Two months later, the 29,000-toh Rebecca emptied thousands of barrels of oily ballast into the inlet before berthing to take on a holdful of Kenai crude...

...On its way, the oil would cross two dozen rivers (including the Yukon), well over a hundred streams, and border scores of lakes in whose sparkling waters salmon, char, pike, and myriad other fish abound...

...Of the 2.3 billion acres of land and water in the fifty states, only about ten per cent remains truly unspoiled...

...En route, this viscous crude would travel the breadth of Alaska's most fragile ecosystems: from the ice-worn coast of Prudhoe Bay, across the lichen-sprinkled tundra of the North Slope, up rolling foothills into the glaciated grandeur of the Brooks Range, through barren, snowbound mountain passes, down to the valleys and forests of the interior highlands, hard by the growing population center of Fairbanks, through the Alaska Range, the Copper River Basin and Chugach Mountains and, finally, down to the waiting ships at Valdez...

...We can have our cake and eat it, too...

...In light of the ephemeral nature of the energy shortfall, there appears no immediate justification whatsoever to violate further the North Slope, much less construct an 800-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Prince William Sound...

...Oil coursing through the pipeline at up to 170 degrees F. would thaw the subsoil into a trans-Alaska quagmire, with incalculable consequences...

...And this would come on top of the $900 million the industry paid the state in September, 1969, simply for the privilege of drilling on the North Slope...

...To help determine the nation's long range energy requirements, the Administration has asked for a "high-level" study from the National Petroleum Council...

...Meanwhile, the Department of Interior astounded no one in January when it recommended that the trans-Alaska pipeline be built...

...As recently planned, all but fifty miles of the pipeline would be buried four to ten feet underground...

...On the contrary, oil congeals at frigid temperatures, and a single spill could visit incalculable mischief on the arctic ecosystem...

...Should an earthquake and tidal wave shatter the region—as they did in 1964—this time the stakes would include perhaps a dozen tankers in the harbor and as much as twenty million barrels of crude in the storage tanks of the pipeline's terminus...

...And, indeed, so it seemed in the early fall of 1970 as scare headlines warned that thousands of citizens faced a chilly winter for lack of residual crude to heat their homes and apartments...

...Nor would the pollution threat diminish if the industry opted to bring its newfound oil to market directly from the North Slope in ships like the S. S. Manhattan, the 115,000-ton deadweight tanker that plowed through the icy Northwest Passage in 1969...

...To get this newly found black treasure to market, the oil industry seeks to lay down an 800-mile pipeline from the Arctic tundra of Alaska's North Slope south to the ice-free port of Valdez...

...But as Senator Philip A. Hart of Michigan has pointed out, "The prime effect of such 'security' measures has been to insulate the American market from the low world prices for oil and petroleum products...

...But while the natives wait for Congress to translate this tardy justice into acres and dollars, Alaska's power brokers seem in no hurry to provide even interim assistance...

...Weeden, "has telescoped the margin of time for wilderness preservation into a very few years...

...A fraction of that oil would turn the Sound into another Lake Erie and seal a slick lid over the Gulf of Alaska's multimillion-dollar fishing industry for years to come...

...In 1971, the agreement is expected to add 100,000 barrels to the 750,000 Canada already exports daily to the United States...

...Anticipating fat profits, the industry has already invested upward of $2 billion in the North Slope and the pipeline, and is prepared to spend a billion or so more before a single drop of Arctic oil starts moving to market...

...Given the impact of modern technology, the population boom and the ever-shrinking supply of open space elsewhere, it should take only a decade or two to foul Alaska...

...Earthquakes, for example, have a particularly chaotic effect on waterlogged ground, their vibrations turning it to liquid and causing catastrophic slides...

...Beyond this immediate relief, the United States and Canada are now busily working out a continental energy policy that would provide, in the words of a joint communique issued by the two governments late in 1970, "full and unimpeded access to United States markets of Canadian crude oil and petroleum products, surplus to Canadian commercial and security requirements...

...To justify their rape of the wilderness, the oil companies and their supporters flay us with conventional wisdom...

...Once widespread, oil pollution from the fleet of tankers and from the North Slope field as well could seriously alter arctic heat patterns, upsetting fundamental weather balances thousands of miles away...

...The natives continue to subsist in abject poverty throughout the state while the $900 million in oil lease money sits in banks gathering nearly $200,000 in interest a day...

...As The New York Times correctly noted early on: "If there ever was a man-made crisis, this is it...

...And in the one-dimensional context of the cash nexus, so it seems...

...It took two centuries to desecrate the forty-eight states...

...Only now is Washington finally dealing with their long-standing claims to ancestral lands taken by Alaska's white settlers in time-honored exchange for fast talk, cheap liquor, and the ravages of tuberculosis and syphilis...

...Never before have conservationists and their allies had a better opportunity to rescue nature from the mindless onslaught of technology...

...Alaska, then, is nothing less than what ecologist Barry Commoner so aptly calls "a living microcosm of the whole environmental issue...

...Despite the combined muscle of industry and government, one thing seems abundantly clear...

...At capacity, the pipeline would generate $200 million a year for Alaska in royalties and severance taxes...

...And the state legislature can't decide what to do with it...

...This prospector mentality, of course, smogged the air, curdled the waters, and blighted the cities of the rest of the nation...

...Almost all of this wilderness is in Alaska...

...They are depending, as industry always does, on the politics of expediency, on the traditional American delusion that, as one Alaskan official put it, "This country's so goddamn big that even if industry ran wild we could never wreck it...

...Historically, Congress has justified this protectionist policy on the grounds that national security requires that the U.S...

...Now, once again, we are playing out the scenario that has reduced so much of the nation to an environmental theater of the absurd...

...Predictably, all these fast bucks have given most Alaskans an acute case of Klondike fever, complete with gilded fantasies of transforming the state—in the words of one former resident—"from a frozen Appalachia to a frozen Kuwait...

...made oil spills a recurring event in Cook Inlet, In the winter of 1967, after a tanker ruptured a compartment while docking, 63,000 gallons of oil poured into the water and spread for miles...

...Significantly, too, the industry-generated flap over shortages turned entirely on heating oil...

...Weeden's words, "an embodiment of the frontier mythology, the sense of horizons unexplored, the mystery of uninhabited miles...

...The prize this time is oil—an estimated 100 billion barrels, maybe more—buried beneath the frigid landscape of our last great wilderness, a stunning national outback the size of Texas, California, and Montana combined...

...But it would take far less than an earthquake to rupture so long and vulnerable a pipeline, and even oilmen concede that spills are inevitable...

...crude, and, by conservative estimates, costs the American consumer some $7 billion a year...

...The Department conceded the project would cause irreparable harm to the environment, then quickly wrapped the decision in the flag by maintaining that the North Slope's oil is "essential to the strength, growth, and security of the United States...

...demand once it began flowing to market through the pipeline...

...The National Petroleum Council is the voice of the oil companies and one of the country's most powerful lobbies...

...Despite all the superlatives employed to describe the black pool beneath the North Slope, the crude there would satisfy no more than five per cent of the U.S...

...oil supply, but some other percentages are more impressive...

...The pipeline would pass through three major earthquake zones...

...The planned plunder of Alaska's North Slope seems particularly criminal at a time when the Government could begin to develop other energy sources—sources calculated to reduce the nation's dependency on a fuel that has become its worst pollutant...

...The forty-eight inch steel pipe would snake through the once-untrammeled habitats of hundreds of thousands of caribou, of wolves and Barren Ground grizzlies, Dall sheep and moose, the peregrine falcon (elsewhere nearly extinct), and millions of migratory birds and waterfowl...

...Water may roll off a duck's back, but oil doesn't...

...supply...

...When President Nixon belatedly accepted these facts in December, 1970, the Great Oil Shortage became the economic non-event of the year...

...These huge potential profits are made possible by the Government's oil import quota program that severely limits imports of low-priced foreign oil, artificially inflates the price of U.S...

...Moreover, in no real sense is Alaska poor at all...

...If thirty or more tankers began crashing through the treacherous passage, the effect of their pollution, in fact, could easily become global...

...Despite this confusion, two things have long been clear: the nation could quickly end its fuel "crisis" if (1) domestic oil production were not rigged low to keep the price stable...

...The threads of this manufactured emergency are admittedly complex, a tangle that includes the volatile politics of the Middle East, the demand for cleaner fuel in the United States, a temporary shortage of tankers, stringent restrictions on imports, a vague energy policy set by a score of Federal agencies, and, not the least, the organized obfuscation of the oil industry...

...Predictably, the oil industry vigorously denies such expansionist aims—all the while poking around in the wilderness for other fields to tap...

...When jackpot psychology fails to persuade opponents, the oil industry offers up perhaps its most specious argument of all—that the North Slope oil is desperately needed to head off an acute fuel shortage in the heavily populated areas of the United States...

...and solar energy, the conversion of sunlight to electricity by synergizing electronic and space technology...

...Much of this earth is permafrost, the perennially frozen subsoil so vital to the stabilization of the Alaskan environment...

...not become too dependent on foreign oil...

...and (2) imports were not rigidly discouraged...

...And the long view proves even less persuasive...

...Yet the fact of the matter is that no real shortage existed then, exists now, or appears at all likely in the near future...

...And given the vastly greater quantity of oil the industry seeks to pump into Valdez, the implications for Prince William Sound are infinitely worse...

...Eventually, two million barrels of hot oil would sluice daily from the wells in the frozen north to mammoth tankers waiting at the terminus on Prince William Sound...

...True, that percentage could be increased, but only by gradually pocking the rest of Alaska with oil wells and crisscrossing the landscape with more and more pipelines...

...A microcosm, moreover, that covers some 586,000 square miles, stretches 3,200 miles through four time zones from the tip of the Aleutians to Prince Rupert on the border of British Columbia, whose 33,000 miles of coastline are half again that of the rest of the nation's seaboard and whose awesome precincts offer Americans their last chance to preserve, in Dr...

...On the contrary, it is rich not only in that rarest of resources— wilderness—but in enormous quantities of tin, timber, zinc, copper, and coal...

...Not surprisingly, President Nixon is marching in the opposite direction...

...If the nation's environmental forces are determined enough, they stand a better than even chance of keeping Alaska from repeating the folly of the rest of the country—from winding up not with cake, but caked in oil...

...He was recently commissioned to write the introduction for the newest Sierra Club Battlebook, "Oil on Ice: Alaskan Wildnerness at the Crossroads," from which he has adapted this article...

...there is no other private industry with similar ability to amass huge amounts of capital, and move men and equipment to remote parts of the earth [and] there is no other industry that changes the appearance of the landscape over such large areas in the process of looking for a resource...