So, say you're the leader of the free world and you're trying to figure out how to get your arms around this climate crisis. There are plenty of good options -- but opening up the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to more offshore oil drilling isn't one of them. It's like trying to empty the bath without turning off the faucet.
Yet that's the awkward stance that President Obama will be taking in Alaska next week, where he'll promote his climate change policies and Arctic stewardship against the backdrop of global concern about his decision to let Shell drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea. He'll address a conference of nations with interests in the Arctic and somehow try to convince them not to follow the example he's setting.
Climate scientists say at least a third of the world's currently-identified oil reserves must remain safely in the ground to avoid cataclysmic impacts to our oceans and climate. Add the oil under the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, which isn't now counted as oil reserves but is estimated to contain about 95 billion barrels of crude oil, and you've got a carbon bomb of massive proportions.
But here's what's so strange: President Obama has made addressing climate change a higher priority than any previous president, recently unveiling new controls on power plant emissions. Yet over the past year, he's also called for offshore oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, endangering wildlife and undermining his own greenhouse gas reduction goals.
How can a president who pledges to address "the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate" single-handedly add two untapped oceans of burned oil to our planet's atmosphere that's already in crisis?
Worldwide oil production and carbon emissions are already at all time highs. Let's not dig ourselves any deeper into this hole.
President Obama's main obstacle to a good climate change policy isn't the global warming denial crazies in Congress - his own policies have accelerated domestic oil production, even in environmentally-sensitive areas.
We see a similar disconnect in California, where Gov. Jerry Brown recently told a Vatican climate change conference that we must leave a third of oil reserves in the ground. And yet, he supports expanded oil production in his state, including recently-authorized controversial offshore fracking permits to squeeze more oil from beneath the ocean floor.
If risking their credibility as climate leaders isn't enough, perhaps Obama and Brown should consider the very real and present environmental risks of offshore drilling, an inherently dangerous form of oil extraction.
The industry itself makes the case, whether it's the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 or, just a few months ago, the crude oil that coated the Santa Barbara coastline and killed hundreds of birds and marine mammals. These weren't aberrations - this is simply the price we pay for offshore oil drilling, an inevitable cost of this risky business.
In the Chukchi Sea, where the Obama administration recently allowed Shell to begin its long-sought Arctic oil drilling operations, conditions are so hazardous that even the Department of the Interior admits there is a 75 percent chance of an oil spill of at least 42,000 gallons of crude. Containing a spill would be far tougher in the unforgiving Arctic than in the relatively calm Gulf of Mexico, which BP found so difficult, and cleaning a spill in that churning, icy sea would be impossible.
Even before drilling takes place, the seismic testing for oil in the Atlantic, according to an Interior report, could injure 138,000 dolphins and whales, including endangered North Atlantic right whales whose calving grounds are in the impact zone, and disrupt marine mammal feeding, calving, breeding, and other vital activities more than 13.5 million times. Nonetheless, the Obama administration quietly opened the public comment period on four seismic testing applications on July 28, as environmentalists were busy criticizing his Arctic drilling authorization from the week before.
The world doesn't need more oil wells, and even if it did, the Arctic and Atlantic oceans are terrible places to put them. We can do better -- future generations of both people and wildlife are depending on it.