The recent order by Judge Sharon Gleason shows how much she doesn’t know about how strict the environmental regulations are in Alaska. For one, they are constantly monitoring emissions. I’ve never heard of any Native village being evacuated due to pollution in the air, and there is only one village near the Willow development. It’s so strict that if even a drop of oil hits the ground from a vehicle or a piece of equipment, it has to be reported and cleaned up immediately. If not, you can get fired from your job.
And as far has the animals, I’ve worked on the North Slope for 35 years and I’ve only seen five polar bears, for they stick very close the the Arctic Ocean, and the roads and pipelines did not seem to brother them at all. And the two or three weeks that the caribou herd comes through, they love the roads and pads — it’s the only places they can get up out of the tundra, which is nothing more than a swamp, in order to get away from the mosquitoes that are eating them up and driving them crazy.
It seems like this judge would prefer that America relies on foreign oil production, where there is little regulation to save the environment — at least I haven’t seen any environmental regulation in Russia or the OPEC nations, and I won’t even get into the fact that this judge obviously didn’t care about the economic impact on Alaska and its people.
— Dale Chalender
Big Lake
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