Ship baby ship

“Drill Baby Drill” is an oft repeated bleat from the flock of petroleum sycophants found in both political parties. I mention both Republicans and Democrats because no serious push back has come from either side. At least not here in Alaska. In fact, if you want to rise above the office of dog catcher in this state, you have to have at least some pro-petro tendencies. A few local politicians may give a cursory hand wringing to climate change, but most will do little or nothing to stop the flow of oil money into state coffers. And why should they? What do we have to replace it? What jobs can we offer the displaced roughneck? And that’s the problem Alaska.

The incoming Trump administration is poised to punch holes all over the north slope. The Willow project, made possible by the outgoing Biden administration (both sides, remember), hopes to produce 200 wells that pump 180,000 barrels of planet choking oil per day. That’s a lot of oil. That’s also a lot of jobs. Politicians don’t usually win elections by taking away the jobs of their constituents. So, what do we do?

One thing we can’t do is continue doing what we have been doing. The planet is changing. It doesn’t matter if you agree with that or not; change is coming and the best we can hope for is to mitigate the worst of it. Pumping more toxins into the atmosphere may be a job producer, but at what cost? Just this year, due to warming temperatures and wildfires, the tundra has gone from a carbon sink, which sequesters greenhouse gasses, to a carbon producer. That’s according to NOAA.

Not long ago, commercial whaling sustained coastal communities. When that went away, buggy whips and the corset industry took a hit, but society did survive. My convoluted point is, we have to start thinking more long term. The job you have today; the job that has sustained you and your family for years and perhaps generations may not be the job you can take into the future. No more buggy whips. Corsets, however, still have a niche market.

So, what do we do? If we take a look at where Alaska is situated, I think the solution becomes obvious. We can ship things from here quicker and cheaper than practically anywhere else on the planet. Fed X and UPS recognized this and their presence has turned Ted Stevens International Airport into the busiest freight hub in the US. That’s right. According to Wikipedia (well known for their impeccable accuracy) Ted Stevens is the busiest air hub in the country. Problem solved. We’ll just take several thousand oil patch workers and put them to work loading airplanes. Well, not quite. The simple fact is, there just aren’t enough jobs and the ones that are here are already filled. So, again, what do we do?

We have the ability to ship quickly and cheaply to just about anyplace in the northern hemisphere. In fact, we do it so well that stuff from the lower 48 is being shipped all the way up here to be shipped all over the world. Actually, it’s more labyrinthine than that. Microchips are made in Taiwan, shipped to Seattle to be assembled into electronic goodies and then shipped to Alaska to be shipped to, oh, I don’t know, Taiwan? So here’s a really radical idea. Why not manufacture stuff here? How about using the chip act to start manufacturing microchips in Alaska? We build them here. Assemble them into products here. And ship them from here. What do you suppose made cities like Chicago and Detroit so successful? It certainly wasn’t the weather. It was their strategic shipping location.

Like it or not, the oil industry is in decline. Every year more evidence points to a changing planet and that change is being driven by our consumption of petroleum. That means demand for oil is going to go down. And that decline is coming in the next few years. If Alaska does not want to become Northern Appalachia, we have to start thinking about what we are going to do after oil. Actually, we should have started thinking about that a decade ago. Our mantra should not be “drill baby drill”; it should be “ship baby ship”.