limits.
Even the most alarmist projections about the BP disaster creating massive âaquatic dead zonesââwhich thankfully did not come to passâpaled next to supermassive aquatic dead zones that really do exist in the Gulf, created not by oil companies but by environmentalist and agribusiness demands that government mandate huge biofuel and ethanol production, which has dramatically accelerated corn farming, the colossal agricultural runoff of which is conveyed to the Gulf by the Mississippi River system.
Will the Gulf be cleaner after American oil companies are banned from drilling there? We canât ban Russia, China, Venezuela, or even Cuba from drilling in international watersâafter all, we donât âownâ the Gulfâwhich all four nations are now busy doing, less than one hundred miles from Florida. Will Chinese oil companies drill as safely as the American oil companies they would replace? Will Russian firms hire American workers? If so, will they pay their workers U.S. wages and protect them according to U.S. standards? Will Cuban oil rigs lessen Americaâs dependence upon foreign oil?
One of the great ironies of the modern energy universe is that while governments around the world have dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into developing new âgreenâ energies like wind, solar, and biofuel, nearly all the significant technology and production breakthroughs have occurred in the old-fashioned oil and gas industries. Everything from hydraulic fracturing that opens up huge new resources in shale to horizontal drilling that gets more oil from existing wells to new seismic technologiesâthey all mean we can open up literally oceans of untapped oil and gas.
If Outsiders knew anything about the Alaskan Arctic, most of it had to do with its native Inuit inhabitantsâknown commonly as Eskimos. For even the best educated, the history of the Inupiat Eskimo was a blank page. It wasnât much more than that to the Inupiats themselves. Most of what Outsiders thought they knew about the native Arctic peopleâs way of life was incomplete, or even wrong.
Alaskaâs Eskimos never lived in igloos; they kiss just like everybody else, and they liked the accoutrements of the modern world. Few Americans were that familiar with Eskimo culture or history. They can hardly be blamed; there wasnât much recorded history to know. Few knew then or now that on a cash basis, Alaskaâs North Slope people were the richest in America. Nor did they know the reason why: oil. Before they realized its far-reaching potential to dramatically improve the quality and comfort of their lives, Inupiats were naturally uncertain about the impact oil development would have on their lives.
Inupiats wondered what impact it would have on their hard scrabble subsistence way of life. They found out with the passage of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). The act was the first and last settlement between the United States government and the native peoples of Alaska for all the land and rights âusurpedâ or otherwise acquired by the federal or state government since the U.S. acquired Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 millionâless than three cents an acre. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act awarded the natives a billion dollars and 45 million acres of Alaskaâs choicest land. The act gave Alaskaâs North Slope Eskimos power to tax their land, which just happened to sit atop trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas. Suddenly, Barrow was awash in cash.
For a village that had spent the previous few decades developing itself using whale meat as its primary means of exchange, Barrowâs sudden petroleum based wealth brought enormous and mostly positive change. Not only were Barrowâs elders not yet wise to the ways of managing money, most of them rarely used it. Illiterate subsistence whalers who didnât speak English were suddenly charged