Energy Security, Alaska Style

Prudhoe Bay, Alaska -- George Bush's one big idea about how to increase America's energy security was to drill for more oil on Alaska's North Slope. He and his allies in Congress promised they could do it safely because the oil industry had made such dramatic improvements in its environmental practices in Alaska. So what happened this week? British Petroleum (BP) announced that it was shutting down the Prudhoe Bay oil field, America's biggest, and cutting off 400,000 barrels of oil a day. This means that, for an indefinite period, we have lost 8 percent of our domestic oil production.

Now why did BP have to shut down its Prudhoe Bay pipeline? Because its environmental practices have been so shoddy that the pipeline was allowed to become corroded and pitted. The company, to save labor costs, reduced the frequency of pipeline inspections below the levels recommended by its own internal manuals. It ignored repeated complaints from its maintenance staff that inspections were inadequate. These problems were followed by a major oil spill this spring. And now it might be months before production can begin again. Apparently it doesn't take a terrorist attack, an earthquake, or even a drunken hunter to shut down oil from the North Slope. Ordinary sloth and greed will do the job by themselves.

Is this really the kind of "security" we want -- where more and more of our domestic energy supplies are produced by demonstrably incompetent companies and run through a highly vulnerable transportation route in a very fragile and harsh environment?

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This Is What the Scientists Warned Us Global Warming Would Be Like:

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"It was gigantic," said Randy Shull, who said he spotted the unusual visitor Sunday afternoon while boating at Kingsland Point Park in Sleepy Hollow. "When we saw it surface, its back was just mammoth."

And This Is What We Can Do About It:

China has made the latest breakthrough in wind technology, unveiling the world's first wind generator based on the principals of magnetic levitation, which also powers maglev trains:

The Maglev generator is expected to boost wind energy generating capacity by as much as 20 percent over traditional wind turbines. This would effectively cut the operational expenses of wind farms by up to half.... according to Guokun Li, the chief scientific developer of the new technology.

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