Letters and Comments

Oil Exploration Irony

By U.S. News Staff

November 5, 2008 RSS Feed Print

After reading "The Race for the Arctic" [October 13-20], I had to laugh at the irony of the whole thing. We are seeing the effects of global warming worsening every year, yet we still just don't get it. The burning of fossil fuels is part of what's causing the ice in the Arctic to melt. We can't wait to drill for more oil. With an already tense relationship with Russia, we now have to butt heads in a new part of the world? In a time when everyone is talking about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, we should be looking at how we can reduce our dependence on oil as a whole. Instead of salivating at the thought of more oil in our backyard, we should see the warning signs such as the ice melt as a wake up call to free ourselves from the addiction to fossil fuels.

Chad Inman
San Jose, Calif.

"The Race for the Arctic" concerned me. A new era of oil and gas exploration, new shipping routes, mining opportunities, diamonds, and gold sound like a "divide and conquer" strategy for the war on the environment, the one war we seem to be winning.

Richard Devens
Center Sandwich, N.H.

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While fossil fuels are a part of the climate change problem, the fact is that if we want our life style to remain anything like it is now, oil will have to play a large role for some time to come. We do of course need to make a shift in our energy usage in order to help preserve our environment. Still, oil will have to remain a primary source of energy. Consequently finding more sources for oil and making sound use of what we already have is an imperative.

However, we do have to accept the idea that our supplies are limited and that increasingly, obtaining oil will bring us into conflict with other nations. At some point it becomes too high of a price to pay, especially considering that conservation alone would make a tremendous impact on demand.

But conservation combined with significant federally funded r&d for alternative energies, combined with the careful and conscientious extraction of our current resources makes tremendous sense and given good leadership with a vision for the future this will in fact become energy policy.

Charles Angell of WI 11:25AM November 06, 2008

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