Big Miracle by Tom Rose Page B

limits.
    Even the most alarmist projections about the BP disaster creating massive “aquatic dead zones”—which thankfully did not come to pass—paled 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 can’t ban Russia, China, Venezuela, or even Cuba from drilling in international waters—after all, we don’t “own” the Gulf—which 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 America’s 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 “green” 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 technologies—they 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 inhabitants—known commonly as Eskimos. For even the best educated, the history of the Inupiat Eskimo was a blank page. It wasn’t much more than that to the Inupiats themselves. Most of what Outsiders thought they knew about the native Arctic people’s way of life was incomplete, or even wrong.
    Alaska’s 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 wasn’t much recorded history to know. Few knew then or now that on a cash basis, Alaska’s 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 “usurped” or otherwise acquired by the federal or state government since the U.S. acquired Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million—less than three cents an acre. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act awarded the natives a billion dollars and 45 million acres of Alaska’s choicest land. The act gave Alaska’s 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, Barrow’s sudden petroleum based wealth brought enormous and mostly positive change. Not only were Barrow’s elders not yet wise to the ways of managing money, most of them rarely used it. Illiterate subsistence whalers who didn’t speak English were suddenly charged