SEASON 3 | EPISODE 5
Path Dependence
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Nick: This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center
MURKOWSKI (CNN): Mr. President…I don’t know if you’ve recognized. This is a very historic day of course, but it’s also the beginning of winter solstice.
AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is the final episode in our series about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And to kick us off here, I want to return to where we started: with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski on December 20th, 2017.
MURKOWSKI (CNN): This has been a multigenerational fight.
AMY: Senator Murkowski was celebrating the signing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which included a provision mandating an oil and gas lease sale in the refuge.
MURKOWSKI (CNN): This is a bright day for America, so we thank you for that. We thank you for that.
AMY: Despite the celebratory tone, when you watch this video from CNN, the moment actually seems loaded with awkwardness. Senator Murkowski is speaking, while President Trump looks on from the side, smiling. But just five months earlier, she had made him very angry, by breaking with her party to vote against his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And nine months after the tax bill was signed, Murkowski would become the only Republican Senator to openly oppose Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. And then there's climate change. Senator Murkowski talks about it as a reality and a threat, while the president denies that it's happening. So, it's hard to imagine that these two are exactly pals. But on this issue – opening the largest wildlife refuge in the country to oil and gas drilling – they found common ground.
MURKOWSKI (CNN): This, Mr. President, is what energy dominance is all about.
AMY:: So my question is: why? Why is a moderate Republican – one who is concerned about climate change – leading the charge for fossil fuel development in a pristine wildlife refuge? How did this become the issue that brought Senator Murkowski and President Trump together?
VICTORIA: Historically we have looked in the north of oil as an economic asset and we have squared it separately from climate change.
AMY: Victoria Herrmann is the managing director of the Arctic Institute, a think tank based in Washington, DC.
VICTORIA: So Alaska is an oil state, right, it provides revenue to run the state budget to run its schools, its healthcare system, and it provides thousands of jobs across the state. Oil equates to the economy. It does not factor in into climate change conversations because that is in a separate silo.
AMY: As we've mentioned earlier, more than 80 percent of the money in Alaska's state budget comes from taxes and royalties that oil companies pay to the state. Historically it's been closer to 90 percent. And Victoria says that history – that commitment to oil as the lifeblood of the state of Alaska – that was also a commitment to a certain way of thinking.
VICTORIA: I think currently there is a path dependence on how we think about energy and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and how we think about climate change.
AMY: A path dependence?
VICTORIA: A path dependence. When Senator Murkowski talks about ANWR she does not talk about climate change, right? She has divided these into two completely separate conversations. You will not see them overlap. Because if they do, then you have a conflict, you have a tension between drilling but also wanting to mitigate your greenhouse gas emissions. So they have to stay separate.
MUSIC
AMY: The fight over drilling in the refuge pre-dates our battles over climate change – but not by much. Both questions emerged in the 1980s. And at that time, the two issues were not connected in people's minds. It's like two trains left the station, side by side, and as they head out, they look like they're on parallel tracks. As the decades roll by, though, you can start to see that those tracks slowly moving closer and closer together. And now, no matter how much some people might want to keep them apart, the ten-ton locomotive of climate change is crashing into the debate over the future of the refuge.
INTRO
“What is the value of these animals and their ecosystems?”
“It’s a big opportunity that we’d be able to profit off of.”
“Our permafrost is melting, our snow doesn’t stick like it used to.”
“I think that it would open up a lot of jobs. I think that it could be a really good thing.”
“This is where we have to live. This is where we have to leave our children when we die. You have to think about that.”
“Climate change is happening. We need to do something about it.”
AMY: Between June of 1988 and March of 1989 four different events happened which have kind of a spooky level of interconnectedness. At least, that's how it seems to me looking back at them now. At the time, they probably didn't seem related to most of the people involved – because like Victoria Herrmann just described, these events were unfolding on different paths, parallel tracks. But as I researched the controversy over drilling in the refuge, I got fascinated by this nine months, and how these four events – two in Alaska, two in Washington, DC – foreshadow the moment we're in now, when the debate about drilling in the refuge and the debate about how to respond to the climate crisis are slamming into each other, full-force.
The first event started June fifth, 1988 – this is what we talked about in our last episode, the Gwich'in Gathering. Members of the Gwich'in nation on both sides of the U.S.- Canada border came together in Arctic Village, Alaska to discuss how to respond to the threat of oil development on the coastal plain.
MAN FROM GWICH'IN GATHERING VIDEO: It doesn't make sense to destroy such a nice, peaceful land. I don't see why we should mess with it. It doesn't belong to nobody. It's just like our parents. We survive on it.
AMY: This is from a video of the gathering made by Northern Native Broadcasting. The man speaking is young, he's outside, he's carrying a gun on his shoulder – it looks like he was asked to do an interview on his way out to go hunting.
MAN FROM GWICH'IN GATHERING VIDEO: It's hard to see the people trying to...destroy the property. Especially the caribou. I mean right in their calving grounds – they're trying to dig around in their calving grounds. I don't see how they could do that.
AMY: The gathering ended on June 10th, and the Gwich'in began to distribute their message that they were united in opposition to drilling in the refuge.
So that's event number one of four here. The second thing happened just thirteen days later, on the other side of the continent. It's June 23, 1988 and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is holding a hearing. It's a sweltering day in Washington, DC, and senators are gathered to listen to scientist James Hansen. Hansen was working for NASA at the time, and he was invited to speak at this hearing to deliver some startling news: humans were warming up the planet by burning fossil fuels. The chairman of that Senate committee was J. Bennett Johnston, a Democrat from Louisiana.
BENNETT: This was very much an introduction to the issue for the public.
AMY: Senator Johnston is 86 years old now, I spoke to him over the phone.
BENNETT: It was clear to me that global warming was a coming issue and that we needed to pay attention to it.
AMY: The idea that humans could be heating up the planet wasn't new. Scientists had been talking about the possibility for a long time. But James Hansen was presenting evidence that it was more than a possibility – it was actually happening. This was big news. The hearing made the front page of the New York Times the next day under the headline, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” Senator Johnston says he took climate change seriously from the beginning.
BENNETT: I mean, we've got to cut down on the amount of carbon that we produce worldwide. It's a worldwide issue. The United States needs to lead the world. It was a great mistake to withdrawal from the Paris accords. That's what we need to do is, is do this on a worldwide basis.
MUSIC
AMY: So the Gwich'in Gathering and the James Hansen testimony happened within two weeks of each other in June 1988. Now, fast-forward to March of 1989. We're still in Washington – in fact, we're still in that same committee. It's March 16th and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee votes yes on a bill to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The sponsor of that bill? Senator J. Bennett Johnston.
BENNETT: I was absolutely convinced having been there many times and having extensive hearings that, the ecological damage would be minimal, the potential for oil and gas for the United States was great.
AMY: And he still feels that way today. The senator who presided over the committee which held the nation's first congressional climate change hearings is the same senator who has been pushing to drill for oil in the refuge since Ronald Reagan was president. Yes, I have questions too. We're coming back to that. But first, you need to know about event number four. On March 24th – just eight days after that pro-drilling bill advanced out of committee -- this happens:
CNN tape: The tanker Exxon Valdez, gouged by a reef. It's already the largest oil spill in US history.
AMY: This is from a CNN report the day of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
CNN: More than eight and a half million gallons poured into Prince William Sound, a prime fishing and recreation area. A five mile long oil slick is moving out to sea.
AMY: Prince William Sound is a southern Alaska inlet dotted with islands, and ringed with gorgeous forested mountains. Tucked into one of the many fjords there is Valdez – a port town and the southern end of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
CNN: The supertanker, bound for Long Beach, California, ran aground about 22 miles south of Valdez, early Friday morning, after loading a cargo of one-and-a-quarter million barrels from the Alaska Pipeline. Oil poured into the sound at the rate of 20,000 gallons an hour for 12 hours.
NYT VID: ...was supposed to have an emergency response team at its terminal in Valdez. But 8 years ago the team was disbanded.
NYT VID:...equipment to fight the spill has to be flown in from as far away as Texas and England
VID: The spill closed the port of Valdez, which pumps 2 million barrels a day. ¼ of America’s crude output.
NYT VID:…Exxon says it's using all available resources, but it argues the spill is simply too big…
AMY: The tanker ended up bleeding 11 million gallons of oil into the sound. The oil rapidly spread through the water, eventually dirtying more than 1,300 miles of shoreline. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds died, along with thousands of otters, hundreds of seals….dozens of species were impacted. Including our own. Commercial fishing and recreation industries in the sound took a massive hit. The families who depended on the animals in those waters for their food had to look elsewhere. The economic and environmental damage ricocheted through the communities nearby – in the wake of the spill, rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse and domestic violence went up across the region. It was a collective trauma. Today, thirty years later, you can still find oil on some of those beaches. And many people say life there has never been the same.
CNN:..the accident is providing a rallying point for conservation groups in the lower 48 opposed to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
AMY: Remember, all of this was just eight days after Senator Johnston's bill opening up the refuge for drilling had passed out of committee.
BENNETT: Ah yes, I remember the timing was very bad.
AMY: Did it give you pause at all. Did it make you think, like, oh, maybe this is something we should be more hesitant about?
BENNETT: No….they're unrelated. I mean, the, uh, use of a tanker, uh, you know, is, it is just not related to the danger of drilling in ANWR.
AMY: Drilling in the refuge would happen on land, Senator Johnston says. The Valdez spill happened in the water. His pro-drilling bill was about oil production, this disaster was about oil transport. From his perspective, it's apples and oranges. But where Senator Johnston saw distinct, unrelated processes, many others saw an interconnected web. The oil that was leaving otters gasping for breath and sea birds unable to lift their wings came directly from the North Slope of Alaska. It was heartbreaking to watch, and it left few people in the mood to open up more wells in the same region. The bill died.
CNN: Alaska is assessing what environmental impact the spill could have on Prince William Sound. Asked what the accident will cost the company, one executive said, “it won't be cheap.” Don Lennox, CNN reporting.
AMY: The Exxon Valdez disaster obviously did not help the cause of the people trying to get drilling approved in the refuge, but as Senator Johnston indicated, it definitely didn't stop them, either. He helped to lead another attempt at getting Congressional approval to drill in 1991. That bill failed. But another, in 1995, made it all the way to President Clinton's desk. He vetoed it. And it goes on and on like this through the years, with lawmakers on both sides trying to resolve the uncertainty hanging over the 1002 area – some trying to make drilling legal, others trying to permanently protect the coastal plain. Until the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed in December 2017.
So you can probably see why this piece of history caught my attention. We've got the Gwich'in gathering, the first Congressional hearings on climate change, a yes vote on a bill to drill in the refuge, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill all happening within one nine-month period. You can mix and match these events dozens of ways, and they always have something to say to each other. And to me one of the most interesting tensions here is Senator Johnston's role as both an advocate for climate change mitigation and drilling in the refuge. For 40 years, he's remained steadfast in support for drilling – even as he's also supported policies to limit carbon emissions.
BENNETT: In my view, the carbon tax is the best way to do it. And we need to promote renewables as fast as we reasonably can.
AMY: If you're concerned about global warming, what makes it OK to drill for more oil? Like how do you square those two positions?
BENNETT: Well, first of all, people, ah, confuse production with consumption. I mean, if you shut down all drilling in the United States, which nobody thinks you could, but if you cut it back, you would simply import the oil from Saudi Arabia and from Russia. And surely people cannot think it is in the interest of the United States to import from those countries as opposed to producing it with the 10 million jobs that oil and gas produces in the United States.
AMY: To get inside Senator Johnston's head here, think about it like this: the oil we burn is going to warm the planet whether it was drilled in Alaska or Siberia. So, why not drill it in the U.S., where we have stronger environmental protections, and we get to make some money off of it?
BENNETT: The amount you burn is dependent on demand. So it's demand that determines the amount that is consumed.
AMY: This argument sounds good at first blush: if you're worried about carbon emissions, reduce demand for oil. And until you do that, drill at home, and make some money.
But the thing is, the demand and supply of oil can't be separated from each other as neatly as Senator Johnston makes it sound. Oil isn't like ice cream. People can't simply decide not to use it anymore, just out of choice. If we could, solving global warming would be easy. But it's not, because in the real-world path that we're on fossil fuels are embedded into everything we do. We use them in the production and transport of our food, our hospitals run on oil, and so do our militaries, and banks, and schools. If enough individuals make choices to reduce demand it can certainly make an impact, but no one person, or group, or even one country has the power all by itself to completely eliminate demand for oil. That's a huge group effort, which requires changes in laws and policy.
And as the climate crisis worsens, that's exactly what many people are pushing for. But when citizens take that route, and fight for the policy changes that would reduce the demand for fossil fuels, oil companies fight back, hard. And they have massive resources at their disposal in that fight – the biggest oil companies have annual revenues far greater than the revenues of most countries. In 2017, for instance, Exxon brought in more money than the government of Switzerland or Saudi Arabia. BP and Shell made even more. And that money means power. It means access to politicians at the highest levels, and influence over the laws that have kept our societies addicted to oil. Senator Johnston has to know about the money and lobbying muscle that oil companies apply toward stopping citizen efforts to get off of oil. Because in addition to being a U.S. Senator, he served on the board of directors of a major oil company from 1997 to 2004.
BENNETT: Yes, I was on the board of Chevron.
AMY: And do you think that has influenced you to make you more open to drilling?
BENNETT: Uh, I, I've always been open to the concept of drilling, so it did not really have any effect on it. I support production in the United States. Clean production, and done in an environmentally responsible way.
AMY: No matter how many different ways I tried to get inside this contradiction between Senator Johnston's pro-drilling, pro-climate action stance, his answer was the same.
BENNETT: I mean, look, it's, it's very plain. The amount of oil that is produced in the United States does not determine how much is consumed in the United States.
AMY: That is a true statement. But given the whole context here, it's a pretty specious argument. Does solving the climate crisis require humans to radically reduce our demand for oil? Absolutely. Are oil companies simply neutral actors responding to that demand? Absolutely not. They're very involved in shaping that market. It comes down to this: you can't spend billions of dollars for decades blocking attempts to reduce demand and then simply shrug your shoulders and say, “hey, don't blame us, we're just giving the people what they want.” Senator Johnston is definitely not alone in making this argument though. And as we've already discussed, he's also not alone in holding his concerns about climate change in one hand and his desire to drill in the refuge in the other.
LISA: And I have suggested that climate change is absolutely, absolutely one, one lens that we must look at.
AMY: This is Senator Lisa Murkowski, speaking from the stage of the Arctic Frontiers conference in Norway in 2019.
LISA: But we must never forget the other aspects of the Arctic. The people who live and work and raise their families there. The economic opportunities, the environmental opportunities and challenges. It is bigger than just one issue.
AMY: After two years of reporting on this region, I couldn't agree more that the Arctic is bigger than just one issue. But what confused me as I listened to this speech is that climate change is not just one issue. It directly affects all the things Senator Murkowski listed – human welfare, economics, security and so much more. I had the opportunity to interview Senator Murkowski very briefly at that conference, and I asked her this:
AMY: Can you make the best possible case for why we should drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge given that you are such a leader among Republicans in saying climate change is real and it's important and it's now?
LISA: Well, I think if you, if you take the perspective that we should never utilize our, our fossil fuels, you should buy into the keep it in the ground theory. Help me out, help me out here. How, how are you going to get to that, that, that, that place, that idyllic place where we will be able to, to power not only this country but power the world off of our renewable resources. We cannot get there from here today without a transition. We cannot do it. And so I would rather be a nation who is providing a resource in a manner and in a process that is more environmentally regulated than the other parts of the world where they are accessing the same resource, they are doing so without the same level of environmental standard and safeguard and in a way that, um, is, is doubly destructive if you will. So do we need to, to lead in, in the transition that takes us to new fuels, new sources of, of energy? Absolutely. But in order to do so, it requires, it requires a level of resource. You can't make this happen just by wishing it. You just can't make it happen by snapping your fingers. So we have to have the resources to, to allow for transition.
AMY: Our short conversation ended there – Senator Murkowski got whisked away to her next appointment, and I was left feeling unsatisfied, because she answered a question I didn't ask. I didn't promote any theory, or suggest that we could get through this transition without oil. I asked her to explain why we should drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And those are very different questions. Because even if we grant that we'll need oil and gas to power us through a transition toward renewables, it's not at all clear that we need to drill on the coastal plain. There's a lot of oil left in the fields that are already in production around the world. And even just in Alaska, almost the entire North Slope is open for business – the refuge is one of the only areas where drilling has been restricted there. I followed up multiple times with Senator Murkowski's office, hoping to have the chance to dig in deeper with her, but I wasn't granted any additional interviews.
I was able to pose some of those questions to a different Alaskan though.
KARA: It's not about getting the oil right now. It is about having the oil for the next generation to come.
AMY: This is Kara Moriarty of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. We'll hear more from her after this short break.
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KARA: I came to Alaska as a school teacher. So I taught school in a small Iñupiaq village called Atqasuk, which is 50 miles south of Barrow.
AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm talking with Kara Moriarty in Anchorage. Kara grew up on a ranch in South Dakota, and she came to Alaska to teach just for a year. After that year was up, she left to go work for South Dakota's Congressman, but...
KARA: Kept in touch with my bush pilot that I'd met. And we just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary last week.
AMY: I had a feeling that was where that was going.
KARA: Yeah, you know, I was the come for one year and then come back to marry your pilot, yeah. So kind of a little bit of a Alaska romance story, I guess, if you will, for your listeners.
AMY: Kara is now the president of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.
KARA: We're the professional trade association for the oil and gas industry in Alaska. So our job is to advocate on behalf of the entire industry to continue the long term viability of the industry for the state.
AMY: I met Kara in her office in August of 2019 – you'll hear some fans flipping on and off a bit as we talk -- and she started by helping me understand all the steps that happen in between holding a lease sale and actually beginning to extract oil on the coastal plain. Just a reminder -- a lease sale is an auction in which oil companies will bid for the right to dill in the refuge.
KARA: You have a lease sale. Well, first of all, we know the lease sale will be litigated because as a tool in the environmental activists tool box that is often used. So we know it'll be litigated. So then you get through the litigation two to three years later, and they put together their exploration plans. Those will probably be litigated, but then it'll take four to five years most likely to explore because we have a very limited exploration season.
AMY: The exploration process involves things like seismic testing, and other ways of figuring out where the oil is. And on the North Slope, companies can only explore when it's cold enough to make ice roads, because those roads protect the tundra from heavy equipment. But as the Arctic is freezing later in the fall and thawing sooner in the spring, it's getting harder to keep ice roads frozen. Companies have found work-arounds, like pre-packing the tundra with snow, to keep the exploration window open as long as possible. But in the long run, this is one of the great ironies of oil development in the far north – the infrastructure for Arctic drilling is built to work on snow and ice, but because of the burning of the fossil fuels being pulled out of the ground, that snow and ice is melting. There's a whole lot more to be said on that topic, but let's get back to Kara's timeline here.
KARA: So exploration will take four or five years and then assuming all that works out, then you've got a five to seven year development plan before you reach production. So when it's all said and done, it's at least – conservative – a dozen years.
AMY: The Trump administration has pledged that the first lease sale will be held this winter, and, as Kara predicted, one lawsuit has already been filed by a group of conservation organizations and the Gwich'in Steering Committee. They say the government is withholding information on the process of tribal consultation and environmental review required by law before leasing can begin. And this will likely be the first of many lawsuits. Several organizations have claimed that the environmental review process was rushed and doesn't provide sufficient analysis of the true costs of drilling to the land, water, air and animals on the coastal plain. We'll be following all of this in coming months.
MUSIC
But, if things go roughly according to the timeline Kara laid out, drilling might begin on the coastal plain in the early 2030s. As we talked through different issues surrounding oil development in the refuge, Kara brought up a lot of the points we've already covered in this series – the economic benefits that the oil industry has brought to the North Slope, her opinion that the risks to the Porcupine caribou herd are overblown, and that 2,000 acre limitation which we examined earlier. But I think the most interesting part of our conversation was when I asked her to make the positive case for drilling – not why environmentalists are wrong, but why oil companies are right.
Because most of the refuge is federal land, owned by all U.S. citizens. So it seems like it's incumbent on the industry to make the case for why they should be allowed to use public land for their private gain. And the public, so far, is not convinced. Although a majority of Alaskans support drilling in the refuge, according to one recent poll, two-thirds of registered voters in the country overall oppose it. So I wanted to hear Kara's best argument for why those people should change their minds. Why should Americans say yes to oil development in the refuge?
KARA: There is going to continue to be a demand for oil and gas. It's still going to be the majority fuel source that supplies the globe's energy needs for the next 30 to 40 years. So why wouldn't we then, as a country, want to develop in our backyard where we know we have the strictest environmental standards. If you look at all the world estimates for the next 30 years, the demand for oil does not go away.
AMY: So one thing that I think, I know some people would say hearing you is, you know, you said, why wouldn't we develop it? I think some people would say because there's lots and lots of oil available in the world already in places that are more developed, or you know, already have impact, but this is a place that is pretty special in the world. Why not – even if we have to develop it someday, you know, 50 years down the road and we're having some kind of massive crisis, why not save it for then, instead of going there now when it is really, it's a special habitat that has a lot of wildlife in it?
KARA: Well, a couple of things to that. We have been saving it, we've been saving it for 40 years already.
AMY: Like Senator Johnston, Kara says our demand for oil is the justification for drilling it. And she says because oil production takes a lot of lead time, you have to stay ahead of that demand curve by constantly opening new fields.
KARA: Oil basins, they start, they peak and they decline. It's just the nature of the business. And so you have to constantly be replacing that decline, and increasing it and the potential. So really this oil is going to be available in 2032. So it's not about getting the oil right now. It is about having the oil for the next generation to come.
AMY: So I think another big argument – you just actually touched on it -- would just be climate change. There's a lot of people would say, why, why should we invest resources and, and, and basically set up the momentum toward getting more fossil fuels out of the ground when they're warming the planet. What's your response to that?
KARA: Well, I think it's very unpractical to say that we're going to be without the use of fossil fuels in the next three decades, because there's not enough alternative energy available, and it certainly would not be affordable for consumers.
AMY: It's true that there's currently not enough alternative energy to meet demand. There are a host of reasons for that – transforming a fundamental sector of the economy is not simple. But renewables are growing fast, and one of the major reasons why they haven't grown faster is the oil industry itself. There are indirect ways that the oil industry has constrained the growth of alternatives – things like tax subsidies and crowding out competitors. But oil companies have also taken more direct actions that have blocked the growth of renewables, including spending millions on campaigns to suppress climate science and confuse the public about the dangers of global warming. Lately, the big oil companies have been changing their tune on that, but what they say is sometimes very different from what they do. As just one example we can look at BP, which is a member of Kara's trade organization. They publicly say they support putting a price on carbon to help reduce emissions. But in 2018, BP spent more than ten million dollars to help defeat a carbon-pricing ballot initiative in the state of Washington.
Even so, Kara says oil companies are helping to develop new, greener technologies.
KARA: And the reality is my very member companies globally are the companies investing in the technology to help with carbon capture, with switching from gas stations to electrical stations for cars. We're not bad, and we're not bad for wanting to continue to meet the global demand for the use of oil and gas, and so, you know, as we continue to develop, we know that we're going to continue to improve.
AMY: In 2018, the world's biggest oil and gas companies together spent around 1 percent of their budgets on clean energy. That's not nothing, but many citizens say the oil industry is still doing a lot more to hurt the climate than to help it. So they've been using a new tool: pressuring banks not to invest in oil development. And that pressure has yielded some results. The European Investment Bank has pledged to end financing for all fossil fuel projects after 2021, and several other international banks have specifically called out the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place where they will not invest in oil and gas. As we've been putting this episode together, the first U.S. bank joined the club – Goldman Sachs announced that they will not finance any new drilling or oil exploration in the Arctic.
It's unclear if or how much all of this might affect the outcome of a lease sale. But the public opposition combined with the relatively low price of oil right now and the high costs of extraction in this remote area make drilling in the refuge a riskier proposition than most.
But there could be a less obvious prize some companies hope to claim.
KARA: Honestly, there's probably a lot more gas in the coastal plain than there is oil. I mean, we have hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas on the North Slope.
AMY: If you look globally, natural gas is the real story of energy development in the Arctic. The gas industry is booming in the Russian north, and like Kara said, the North Slope of Alaska also has enormous natural gas reserves. The problem in Alaska though is transportation. Attempts to build a gas pipeline similar to the oil pipeline that cuts through the state have gone nowhere. So far. But oil and gas executives must be casting their eyes longingly on all of that untapped gas in the refuge. And even though both the oil and gas markets are considered to be in a state of oversupply right now, Kara says we have to keep opening up new areas for drilling.
KARA: And what we have today will not be enough to supply the next 30 to 40 years. So we have to add resources as we continue this transition to other sources of energy,
AMY: Even with oil at $56 a barrel?
KARA: Who knows what oil price is going to be, I mean…
AMY: And the discoveries in Texas –
KARA: Right, but I mean the discoveries in Texas are still not going to help meet the demand 30 to 40 years from now. So in the end you kind of need it all. You have to be able to, to add to the reserves as I, you know, tried to explain.
AMY: Yeah. I think though that, that, that feeling that, you know, in the end we are going to need it all. I mean that's kind of the crux of it, is that there are a lot of people saying like, no, actually the truth of it is we have to stop before we get it all, or that's not practical.
KARA: But, but my answer, my question back to them is what are you going to do? I mean if you stop and you know that the alternative energy isn't going to be there, what do you do in the meantime? Do, do you go back to, you know, candlesticks? I mean I don't think so.
AMY: Kara is doing the same thing Senators Johnston and Murkowski did when I asked about this tension between drilling in the refuge and mitigating climate change. They all responded with some version of “well we can't just shut down all drilling immediately.” But that dodges the question. Almost everyone recognizes a transition is necessary here – that we can't just stop all use of fossil fuels tomorrow, and go back to candlesticks as Kara says. Where the real debate lies is over when and how and how fast we're going to make the transition. That's where the question emerges about opening up new fields. Especially in pristine wilderness areas. And especially in a context in which there's ample evidence that the oil industry is slowing the transition down. But Kara says oil companies are being villainized for providing reliable, affordable power.
KARA: I mean, I think that's the other thing that gets overlooked is that the oil and gas industry has unlocked potential and quality of life for people across the globe. Once people have a reliable source of power, once they have a reliable source of heat, especially one that they can afford, um, it opens up whole new opportunities for them, and it improves their livelihood. And the data is there to back that up.
AMY: I don't think anybody's questioning that when you have access to affordable power, it benefits individual humans and benefits communities, it can even benefit an entire state or country. But at the same time, that has collective impact that is detrimental to all of us in the long run. And so I don't think anybody has to be a villain or a hero to have it be like, that's...that's a problem. You know, how do we solve that? That like, yeah, this community can do well or our country can do well, but all of us as humans and living things on this planet are eventually going to...we're getting tanked by the damage to the climate. And I'm just curious, like, how do you make sense of that?
KARA: Yes, we're all concerned about making sure that our planet is here for more than generations to come, but how do we utilize our know-how and the technologies that we have and that we continue to improve upon. Because if we're not, we’re not operating the same way, I mean we're learning how to be better, but the only way you
“be better” is by continuing to do it. You don't just stop, because there is a demand for that product.
AMY: At the beginning of this episode, we were talking about path dependence – how the choices we've made in the past shape what we think is possible today. But our human pathways all happen here on planet Earth – they're part of natural systems that have their own momentum, their own trajectories; that operate according to their own rules. One of those rules says if you burn a whole lot of carbon-based material very quickly you knock the systems regulating the climate out of whack, and it can take a very long time for those systems to find a new equilibrium. This is the path we're co-creating with the planet. And the longer we stay on it, the harder it is to change course.
VICTORIA: It's hard to bring everyone into the same conversation.
AMY: Again, Victoria Herrmann of the Arctic Institute.
VICTORIA: While here we're talking about ANWR and about drilling, and climate change, it's important to know that most conversations that happen about the Arctic in Washington DC are focused on national security and are not about energy or climate or human welfare. They are about icebreakers and military spending and our relationship to Russia. I try to continuously bring up climate change and energy development, but that is not the norm for a DC conversation about the Arctic.
AMY: And in addition to security, a lot of conversation about the Arctic these days revolves around commerce. Addressing the Arctic Council last spring, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talked glowingly about the oil, gas and minerals waiting to be drilled and mined in the far north. A few years earlier, the former president of Iceland did the same, and referred to the region as “a new Africa.” This is another one of the well-worn paths that shape our thinking about the Arctic and the refuge – for centuries, white people have been imagining the far north as an empty space in which they have brave adventures while extracting valuable resources.
ARCO VID: The men of Prudhoe Bay are heirs to a tradition of Arctic exploration began in the last century by Perry and Frobisher. Searching for oil may seem less romantic than racing to the pole by dog sled, but the potential for mankind is no less impressive.
AMY: This is some tape from that old film I played you back in our first episode of this series, when we were tracing the origin story of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was made in 1975 by the Atlantic Richfield Company as they were preparing to start drilling at the Prudhoe Bay oilfield. And I just want to revisit it for a minute, because I find it to be such a revealing artifact from that time and place. Just check this out:
ARCO VID: Once this vast land belonged to the wild animals. Today, there's still room for the caribou to graze peacefully in a largely unspoiled environment. Now the Arctic wilderness must be shared with a strange new breed that migrates in trucks and airplanes. Protecting the animals' freedom through strict company regulation, man claims part of their land to help ensure his own survival.
AMY: This short clip contains so much information about the mindset at work here. We're told this land once belonged to the animals – not to the indigenous people of this region -- and now it must be shared with this “strange new breed,” these men arriving to claim part of the north for their own survival. Of course, Alaska Native people have been using the land, water, plants and animals of this region to ensure their own survival for millennia. But with a few lines and a sentimental soundtrack, all of that is rendered invisible. ARCO gives a passing mention of providing new jobs for Eskimos, and then quickly returns to the main objective: documenting their own heroic battle with the natural world.
ARCO VID: As a storm rages, nature reasserts her power over man. But on the land, man retains control.
AMY: Nature is the enemy – the other -- often referred to with a feminine pronoun.
ARCO VID: Pitting himself against nature, man has beaten the odds.
AMY: We might not speak quite as plainly about it these days, but this conquering mindset is still very much at work in the Arctic. And often, conquering places – or people – begins with devaluing them. And this leads me into something that I found over and over as I dug into the story of the refuge. Throughout the history of this controversy, people have tried to portray the area as unworthy of protection because it's not pretty enough.
BENNETT: ANWR is the most misrepresented place I think I've ever seen.
AMY: Again, Senator J. Bennett Johnston.
BENNETT: People speak of it as if it's a beautiful area. They've conjured up this view of this, uh, beautiful Serengeti, which it is really not. I was up there I think four times, including spending the night on ANWR. I have yet to see a bear up there. The coastal plain is just a tundra…
AMY: Senator Johnston and many other pro-oil people I spoke with claimed that conservation groups put mountains in pictures of the drilling area to make it look more appealing. Kara Moriarty said this too.
KARA: You don't even see mountains from the 1002 area.
AMY: That's actually not true. The mountains are indeed visible from the coastal plain. And Senator Johnston is also wrong when he says that the coastal plain doesn't support many animals. The northern tundra plays an important role in the life cycle of dozens of species. But more than the factual mistakes, but the real question is – when did the tundra become inherently less valuable than a mountain range? Like, who decided that? Yes, tundras are flat and open. So do prairies. Does that mean they're worthless? It's very ironic that some of the politicians claiming they support Iñupiaq people have no problem describing their homelands in disparaging terms. For instance, former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens said this during a 2005 Congressional debate over drilling in the refuge – quote “I defy anyone to say that that is a beautiful place that has to be preserved for the future. It is a barren wasteland, frozen wasteland...” End quote.
This tactic of devaluing a place in an attempt to persuade others not to protect it has a long, disturbing history. This is how nuclear waste ends up on Native American reservations, and the tops of mountains get chopped off in Appalachia. We're told these places are ugly, or unimportant, so it doesn't matter if we trash them. And one thing these supposed “sacrifice zones” almost always have in common is that the people who live in and around them don't have very much money or power.
AMY: How...how worried are you about oil development?
VEBJORN: I don't want to live in an oil field.
AMY: This is Vebjørn Aishana Reitan. We met him in our first episode – he's from Kaktovik, Alaska. I’m sitting next to Vebjørn in his boat, heading out from the village to visit the coastal plain.
VEBJORN: It's not that important to me to have money. I guess.
VEBJORN: And I don't think we should, we should sacrifice our land that makes us who we are just so we can have a stake in a industry that's ultimately going to lose I think. I don't think we should sacrifice what we are just so they can drill oil.
AMY: Vebjørn lands the boat, and we walk around a little bit on the tundra. It's wet and green, with little creeks cutting down to the beach. A hawk hovers in the distance, flapping its wings and staring into the grass with a hunter's intense focus. Ted Stevens said this land had “no beauty at all,” but to Vebjørn, and many other people who live here – people on both sides of the drilling debate – this place is precious. And Vebjørn says that if we can't see that, and feel it, maybe that says more about us than it does about this place.
AMBI
VEBJORN: I think people should get out more. Good for people to be out on the land. I think it's important to live outside your house, not just be locked up inside.
AMY: Yeah.
AMY: Being with Vebjørn on the coastal plain of the refuge made me think of a poem by Wendell Berry. It's called “How to Be a Poet,” and there are these three lines in the middle that go like this:
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
VEBJORN: Yeah, everybody….everybody should get out more. Enjoy the nature. Then this becomes more close, close to you…]
AMY: Yeah… yeah
AMY: The conflict over drilling in the refuge is so binary. For or against. Pro oil or anti oil. If one side wins, the other loses. It's been a long, loud, angry fight and it's not over yet. It's such a contrast with how it feels on the coastal plain. Here, at the epicenter of the battle, it's quiet. Open. Calm. And the enormity of the space around me gives me something that's increasingly hard to find in our world – a tangible sensation of how small my own life, with all of its arguments, really is.
VEBJORN: Yeah, it's, it's beautiful in its own way. It's, it's not as...It's not like a beautiful mountain.You could say it's strikingly empty right now. It's, it's beautiful in a different way.
AMBI
MUSIC
AMY: This series was funded by the Pulitzer Center, Montana Public Radio, the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, the William H and Mary Wattis Harris Foundation, and by you, our listeners. Thank you to all of you for making this show happen. We're going to be keeping an eye on how things unfold in the refuge, if you'd like to stay informed follow us on social media, and join our mailing list at thresholdpodcast.org. You can also find lots of pictures from our reporting trips there, as well as all of the audio from the first two seasons of our show. Again, all of that is at thresholdpodcast.org.
Huge, huge thanks to the whole Threshold team for bringing this series together. Nick Mott and I are the producers, Eva Kalea is our marketing and operations director, Lynn Lieu runs our social media, Caysi Simpson and Brook Artziniega are our current our interns, Megan Myscofski was our summer intern, Tej Reddy is helping us write grants, Michelle Woods is our graphic designer. And our board includes Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Matt Herlihy and Rachel Klein. Big thanks to them and to Michael Connor and Frank Allen. Our music is by the ever-fabulous Travis Yost.