GIP and stuff

[kellinator]

Look at this awesome icon relevantpink made for me! She picked "shipwrecks" from my interest list and gave me this great multi-purpose icon.

I'm still hunting for my current political icon. I've seen a couple of good candidates over at liberal_icons. I hate to give up the Kerry icon, but I'm reaching the point where I sit there debating over which icon to delete every time I get a new one, and that's just sad. But, you know, you don't want to get rid of the nice ones people made for you... I did delete a Munch icon a while back. See? It has happened.

Oh, forgive me while I indulge in a moment of "told you so":

Drilling approved for Alaska oil reserve

I'm sorry. I'd like to be writing politically insightful things, but right now I'm still trying to figure out what the hell I can do to make a difference.

In the meantime, I'll probably just write fluff.

Comments

[dwivian]

Oh, and since you've heard more...

....have you heard any assessment of the likely quality of the oil? I know we love Saudi reserves because it is a premium grade, easily refined. As we barely can manage refining what we get now, would the ANWR oil be more or less dirty? Could we even make use of it, or would we export it like we do much of the Prudhoe Bay oil?

[alfabettezoupe.livejournal.com]

hehehe, answered this in the above before i saw this :)

the oil is good, but it's going to need a lot of refinement to be made useable. you then get into the arena of whether it would be good to set up the refiniries in alaska or not. in all honesty, i don't see that as a bad idea. the state is enormous and in unprotected areas there's more than enough room to build and run things without having any impact on the people within the bigger cities.

[dwivian]

That's what I was afraid of -- I'd heard that we export most of our oil to other countries that can use the lower grade, or afford it, whichever. It seemed odd that we were an oil exporter with our demand, but if the oil is a pain to clean, it makes sense.

I just don't see the refineries being in Alaska, though. A refinery is, necessarily, dirty, and that'd be a real mess for the argument that we try to take care of the environment with the drilling. Houston has the worst air on record, on average, and it's because of all the nearby refineries. I'd hate to see the air in Anchorage destroyed like that. But, building a "clean" refinery is going to be so cost-prohibitive that it won't happen until we're on the downslope of oil availability, I fear.