Honey badger don’t care. Honey badger don’t give a shit, it just takes what it wants.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck on Sunday near the native Alaskan village of Kaktovik and part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where the Trump administration plans to allow oil drilling, but no injuries or damage were reported.
The temblor, which occurred just before 7 a.m. (1500 GMT), was the most powerful on record to hit Alaska’s oil-producing North Slope, said Paul Huang, a seismologist and deputy director of the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska.
No tsunami alert was generated, though ground motion was felt as far away as Fairbanks, Alaska, nearly 400 miles (644 km) to the south.
Now compare the above map to a map where Donald Trump intends to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The National Wildlife Refuge system was founded by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 to protect “boundless areas of wildlife and wetlands in the United States.” Nearly 50 years later, the National Park Service proposed and recommended that the untouched areas in the NE region of Alaska (N/K/A the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) be preserved for research and protection of nature forever as part of the National Wildlife Refuge system.
The controversy over whether to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge(ANWR) began in 1977. That very year, Exxon became aware that fossil fuel emissions was the cause of climate change and was a real and growing threat to the very survival of the Earth’s bio-sphere.
ANWR comprises about 20 million acres. Unfortunately, 1.5 million acres of the reserve were set aside by Congress and President Jimmy Carter in 1980 to study the potential for energy production. Radical Republicans in Congress and in Alaska dismissed the possible environmental impacts of oil extraction in ANWR while arguing that there would be just a teeny-tiny amount of a footprint necessary. They actively pushed this lie that oil development would only impact 2000 (out of 20,000,000 acres) known as the 1002 area. The GOP, in a effort to make the idea of destroying the Alaskan North Slope more palatable to a doubting public, used tricks and falsehoods to sway the public to support the fossil fuel industry drilling plan in the ecologically sensitive region. Democrats, Environmentalists and some Republicans in turn dismissed their plan as absurd.
Fast forward to 2017 where Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate (many of whom had been installed by the sabotage of a oil hungry tyrant named Vladimir Putin—Putin who was aching for the Obama installed sanctions on Russia’s oil industry to be lifted with the full knowledge and blessing of the Trump campaign and Mitch McConnell). Insatiably drunk on power and greed, they gleefully snuck a ANWR drilling provision in their tax cut bill (a giveaway to only the richest of the rich, btw). This despite warnings from Trump’s own Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that had calculated “there’s a 75 percent chance of one or more spills of more than 1,000 barrels of oil over the next 77 years, given 500 wells and 4.3 billion barrels of oil produced. The Exxon Valdez spill in1989 spilled an estimated 260,000 to 900,000 barrels; the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 spilled about 4.9 million barrels”.
There is a myriad of problems with drilling in the north slope including thawing permafrost, oil spills from drilling as well as from the tankers that transport the raw crude, more carbon pumped into the atmosphere, extinction threats to walrus and the massive herds of caribou cows that migrate from the Yukon to ANWR where they give birth to their young near the Arctic coast.