My dad and I were watching Head to Head, a show on Fox News, on the weekend and Robert Kennedy Jr was on. We were just shaking our heads and making fun of him, the kid is an idiot. He was saying that drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska is wrong. I think he is a fool.
First of all, he was saying that the ANWR is one of the last large wilderness areas in the world and he wants to save it and we can do that by conserving our oil use. Cool, I'm all about conserving the wilderness and oil. However, ANWR is humongous and there is no way that drilling for oil in it is going to destroy the entire area. Secondly, putting in an oil pipeline doesn't cause the wilderness around it to disintegrate. The existing pipeline on the North slope in Alaska was built in the wilderness and plenty of wildlife still live there and ignore the pipeline and the people. In fact, the caribou population has grown tremendously since the pipeline was put in. Drilling for oil in ANWR is not going to destroy the area. While it's true that drilling will affect some of the wilderness, it's not a big deal since Alaska is full of wildlife refuges. There are forests everywhere in Alaska; the place is huge. Even in neighborhoods there are forests with moose roaming freely.
What strikes me as ignorance is that Robert Kennedy Jr. doesn't even talk about ever having been in Alaska. All the people that go on news programs and speak against drilling for oil in ANWR are not Alaskans, they're politicians who don't spend any time in Alaska. What do they know? It's been six and a half years since I've lived there, but not much has changed in regards to the pipeline. Most Alaskans want you to drill for oil there. Mainly, it provides more jobs. Working on the pipeline is good money. So many Alaskans work on the pipeline, when I was growing up most of my friends' dads worked on the slope. Also, getting oil from Alaska means a bigger dividend check for Alaskans. Because the government makes money off the oil, every person living in Alaska who has lived there for at least two years gets a dividend check. The amount varies, but I remember that one year it was a little more than one thousand dollars and that was a big deal. That means my family got over five thousand dollars just for living in Alaska. The more oil brought in, the more money Alaskans get.
Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not a bad idea. It won't put a dent in the Alaskan wilderness, it provides more good jobs for Alaskans, and it brings in more money for Alaskans. Besides, drilling for oil in our own country saves us from drilling in the land of a country that we're not exactly on good terms with. Robert Kennedy Jr. needs to get his head out of his butt.
For a transcript of the show you can go to: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96730,00.html.