Re: ANWR

If it's true that the world will someday need to seriously curtail the amount of it's energy it gets from oil, would it make sense to shift our reliance to nuclear where possible before we destroy that which we couldn't renew?

I'm not convinced we will run out, I think it's manufactured through geological, not biological/geological, processes. However, if there's a chance would it make sense to plan for that sooner rather than later?

The Shah of Iran, a friend of oil and the US if there ever was one, in an interview before he died, suggested the West develop other energy resources. He pointed out that oil was used for any number of things which couldn't be had another way - plastics, medicinals, and so on. He said he couldn't understand why the West didn't save all the oil for those.

I am convinced that drilling would largely destroy ANWR. The percentage upon which they want to drill is small, but it's in a whole lot of parcels scattered over a wide area connected by roads and pipelines. Besides that damage, no matter what they say, no matter how much goes into preventing them, there are always spills. Always. Whether it's human error, equipment malfunction or an act of nature, doesn't really matter. There are spills.

Even where there aren't 'spills', some California beaches I've been on have been really unusable - there are blobs of tar all over which have just sort of leaked around the wellheads and landed on the beach. It takes a lot of gas to get that stuff off. (And oil can leak naturally, I know. It just seems to happen a lot more around wellheads.)

Arf