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Posted on 10/21/2001 7:25:24 AM PDT by real saxophonist

Extremism in defense of tundra

I was stunned to see an environmental lawyer declare in last Saturday's Rocky Mountain News that calls to reduce consumption of Mideast oil are "overtly racist." But that's what Travis Stills of the Oil & Gas Accountability Project in Durango said. After all, he argued, no oil supplies are truly secure. "Look at that guy who shot the Alaska pipeline," he triumphantly asserted.

So, a bored, trigger-happy drunk poses the same risk to oil supplies as instability in the Middle East? Maybe Stills should ask industry executives which threat they spend more time worrying about.

To appreciate just how insecure Mideast oil supplies might be, check out Seymour M. Hersh's article, "The Problem with Princes," in the Oct. 18 issue of The New Yorker (you can read it online at www.newyorker.com). According to Hersh, "Since 1994 or earlier, the National Security Agency has been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, which is headed by King Fahd. The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country's religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it."

It gets worse. "In interviews last week," Hersh writes, "current and former intelligence and military officials portrayed the growing instability of the Saudi regime -- and the vulnerability of its oil reserves to terrorist attack -- as the most immediate threat to American economic and political interests in the Middle East."

Hersh cites a CIA study that allegedly concluded that "with only a small amount of explosives terrorists could take the oil fields off line for two years," sending oil prices to the moon.

Now, maybe that wouldn't particularly trouble Stills.

There are plenty of environmental activists who clearly would welcome such wrenching economic news, since they consider this nation's "fossil fuel dependency" to be something that is very nearly immoral.

But those of us who would rather avoid the fallout from quadrupling oil prices, and who are grateful for modern prosperity rather than ashamed of it, might take issue with Stills' claim that concern over the security of Mideast oil stems from dark and ugly motives. The New Yorker is not exactly a mouthpiece for the Aryan Nation, and Seymour Hersh is hardly a nativist soulmate of Patrick Buchanan.

Of course, no sensible person believes that the United States can ever eliminate its reliance on foreign oil.

"Energy independence" is a slogan, not a serious goal. For that matter, there's no reason to believe that even if fundamentalist revolutionaries seized power in Saudi Arabia that they would cut off oil to the West -- in the long term. Why seize the bank and then blow up the vault?

Iran hasn't stopped selling oil to the West, despite more than 20 years of official hostility toward nearly everything we stand for.

Even so, surely it's prudent to reduce the potential leverage of a future Saudi regime eager to finance literally thousands of aspiring clones of Osama bin Laden.

Yes, the present Saudi rulers apparently already subsidize anti-Western terrorism, as Hersh and others persuasively argue -- yet as bad as that is, the situation could be much, much worse.

What Stills' comments and others like them I've seen in recent weeks prove is that there is no argument and no national crisis that can budge some environmental activists off blanket opposition to resource extraction -- any time, any place -- on public lands. It's not just natural treasures and the integrity of significant ecosystems that they want protected, as do most Americans.

They now describe every piece of public real estate as critical to conservation efforts and to the health of the planet. A tiny patch of coastal plain in Alaska whose flat tundra looks a lot like many other patches of flat tundra has become, in their campaign against oil exploration there, one of nature's last unsullied "cathedrals," a "hallowed" ground equal to Yellowstone or Yosemite.

Until last week, I'd thought the rhetoric against domestic oil production had become as shrill as it could get.

Thanks to Travis Stills, I see that I was wrong.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@rockymountainnews.com

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