High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet

Toohey hadn’t read any of them. ‘But I can tell you that in the US there is not a consensus on what the solution is to climate change – nor what the causes are,’ he maintained. And, in the meantime, he concluded, it was better to drill for oil on home territory than to depend on unstable dictatorships in the Middle East. So the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had to be prised open.

I had one last question. ‘After that, will you be happy, or will you be campaigning to open up somewhere else?’

‘Well, it all depends,’ he smirked. ‘We have other regions in the state that hopefully can be utilised for natural gas production. As long as we have the resources – and there’s a demand in the country for production – we should be able to develop it.’

I left feeling unsatisfied. Cam Toohey was clearly no dummy – his answers were articulate and relatively well-informed. Yet I had been met with a wall of denial. There was no sign of doubt, nor any suggestion that precaution might be a good policy given the potential magnitude of climate change. There was no alternative, he had said. Economic development must march forward, whatever the weather.

Since I conducted that interview, Cam Toohey has been appointed by the Bush administration’s Interior Secretary Gale Norton as her Special Assistant for Alaska. Toohey, the Alaska Oil & Gas Reporter noted ominously, would ‘assist Norton with the management of 270 million acres of federal lands that fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Clearly his appointment reveals something about the seamless connection between the oil industry and the current US administration. Indeed, Norton herself has a distinctly un-ecological track record, having spent much of her earlier (legal) career fighting environmental regulations and promoting the interests of polluting corporations.

Not everyone was pleased by the decision – one Congressman said that Norton’s new Assistant was an ‘ethical oil spill’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Prescient words, it seems: during the first ninety days of Toohey’s new role, he was engaged in allowing increased numbers of tourist cruise ships back into the fragile Glacier Bay, despite a court decision restricting their numbers on environmental grounds; weakening Clintonera mining restrictions; promoting new oil-drilling leases in offshore Alaskan waters; and, of course, working to achieve his lifetime ambition of opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Clearly Alaska’s public lands are in extremely attentive hands.

Having had my first lesson in the oil industry mindset, I felt it was time to visit the heart of the beast – Prudhoe Bay itself, the largest oilfield ever discovered in the Western Hemisphere. Located on the northern Arctic Ocean coast of Alaska, Prudhoe Bay is only one of a whole complex of different oilfields, all stuck out in the freezing flat tundra of the North Slope. With the sea coast ice-bound for most of the year, the oil is transported 1200 kilometres south to the warm-water port of Valdez via the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

One of the biggest industrial developments on Earth, the scale of the North Slope oil development is only really apparent from the air: as my plane came in to land, literally scores of drilling pads – each a set of little box-like buildings arranged around a central rig – stretched as far as the eye could see across the monotonous white plain.

The whole thing takes up about 650 square kilometres (250 square miles), and stretches east-west along the shore of the Arctic Ocean for nearly two hundred kilometres. Each well (there are up to forty wells per drilling pad) sucks oil from several thousand metres down and over an area of 80 acres or more. Every drop of this oil eventually ends up being burned in the cars, trucks and aeroplanes that keep America’s economy turning.

Most of the Prudhoe Bay area is off-limits to the public, officially for security reasons. It was bitterly cold when I arrived at the small town of Deadhorse, and I hurried through the powder snow over to the Prudhoe Bay Hotel, the only accommodation open to visitors.

The hotel was basic, with long corridors of rooms sharing the same washing and toilet facilities throughout the lowslung two-storey building. Tough-looking workmen, all wearing grubby jeans and baseball caps, stomped up and down the hallways, fresh from the outlying drilling areas – many on their way back down south for breaks with their families. Food was included in the room price, but a sign advised hotel residents that breakfast was only served between 4.30 and 7.30 a.m. Another handwritten sign on the door warned that bears were in the area.

BP, the largest operator in the Prudhoe Bay area, had spurned my request for a guided tour, but I was able to get in anyway thanks to the deputy manager of the hotel, who ran his own minibus tours. As we bumped along the gravel roads, having shown our passports to a guard at the check-point, he explained the Prudhoe Bay lifestyle. Although about 1500 people worked in the oilfields, he said, there were only twenty-five permanent residents – most in Deadhorse itself. Everyone else worked shifts: two weeks on, two weeks off. ‘When you’re on shift you work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. When you’re off, you fly home.’ No alcohol was permitted in the entire place – not even in the hotel.

We passed a large yellow building belonging to Halliburton, the controversial oilfield services company whose former CEO is the current US vice-president Dick Cheney. ‘Dick was here just a few weeks back,’ recalled my guide nonchalantly, before slowing down to indicate the Central Gas Facility, a massive red complex the size of three football stadiums.

Then we were at the shore of the Arctic Ocean itself: a small slope before an impossibly large, white expanse. ‘The North Pole is over there,’ he indicated, before pointing out BP’s Northstar oil platform twelve kilometres offshore. I tramped through the powder snow onto the ice itself, savouring the moment. Small snow flurries fell from an almost-blue sky, and large cracks were visible where the sea had pushed ice up against the shore.

My guide was muttering darkly about the Greenpeace campaign which had focused on Northstar a few years previously. They were ‘very rude people’, he recalled, who had been airlifted in because none of the native Eskimos would help them reach the site overland. No one would give them space in the hotels either, he said with a chuckle. ‘They caused all sorts of problems. And you know what?’ he concluded triumphantly. ‘They left the place in such a mess that the oil industry had to clean up after them!’

On the way back we detoured via Pump Station One – the very beginning of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. There was a section cut out of the outer pipe-casing so people could put their hands in: the inner pipe was warm, like blood, and vibrated slightly as the black liquid surged away southward. This was the same oil, incidentally, which poured out of the Exxon Valdez tanker in March 1989 in one of the world’s worst oil spills.

Back in the hotel I was stopped in the corridor by Max, a half-Eskimo guy, who regarded me suspiciously. ‘You from Greenpeace or something?’

No, I was a journalist, I told him.

He assumed I was covering the Arctic Refuge story – the western border of the Refuge is not far from Prudhoe Bay. ‘I’d say that the oil companies have supported a lot of people for a long time,’ he began. ‘In the 1970s we were having a hard time. I remember having to put our pennies together to even buy a can of soda.’

I asked him about global warming.

‘I think it’s all hype,’ he snorted. ‘We had snow in the first week of May in Fairbanks.’

An older grey-haired man, a policeman from Barrow, joined in. ‘Global warming don’t come from here, it comes from Chicago, New York, where all the emissions are.’ He jabbed his finger forcefully. ‘The whole world depends on oil, so why are we always the bad guys?’

‘You came over on a jet, right?’ demanded Max. ‘Or was it solar-powered or electric-powered?’ He fixed me with a mocking grin. ‘You sure you’re not from Greenpeace?’

All these mentions of ‘Greenpeace’ were beginning to draw a crowd. I backed off, using the excuse of fetching my press card to show Max.

The policeman followed me. ‘The air here’s clean,’ he persisted. ‘You can’t even burn waste without monitoring emissions.’ He turned to a grizzled man in a Chevron baseball cap: ‘What do you think about global warming?’

The man had just come in from outside, and looked cold. ‘I’m ready for it!’

Like most outsiders, I have long been conditioned to think that indigenous people usually fight against the oil industry, so finding out that the North Slope Eskimo communities were some of the industry’s strongest supporters initially came as a shock.

As the North Slope Borough Mayor George Ahmaogak puts it in a glossy brochure I was given by Cam Toohey’s secretary:

As Mayor, I can state unequivocally that the people of the North Slope Borough enthusiastically support the presence of the oil industry in our land. North Slope oil has already provided immense benefits to our people and to our country. Well-meaning Americans crusading against Coastal Plain development would deny us our only opportunity for jobs – jobs providing a comfortable standard of living for the first time in our history.

(#litres_trial_promo)

In my last stop before leaving Alaska, I was particularly interested to hear how oil development could be squared with the widespread Native American view of themselves as custodians of the land, and whether anyone was noticing the impacts of global warming or knew any details about its cause. It was time to visit one of the closest Native settlements to Prudhoe Bay, and the only human habitation within the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – the Inupiat Eskimo village of Kaktovik.

KAKTOVIK

At first sight, it was clear that Max had told the truth. The oil industry had done well for the people in the area. Many of the houses had pickup trucks as well as snowmachines, and smooth gravelled roads led between the buildings. There was proper water and sanitation too – something which Shishmaref had notably lacked, where ‘honeybuckets’ (a bucket with a bag which is carried out and dumped centrally when full) had been the only toilets. Oil money had also brought the village – which, like Shishmaref, had once been just a few earth houses stuck out on the barrier island – a high school, a fire station, a police department, a community centre, a water plant, a power plant and a municipal services building.

The industry has also brought jobs to Kaktovik. Many of the young men and women work in Native-owned oilfield contracting companies, which is helping to improve the standard of living and keeping unemployment – the scourge of Native communities – down to tolerable levels. As I talked to people around the place, I rapidly got the impression that not even the elders felt nostalgic for the days when the Eskimos had lived entirely off the land. It had been a difficult existence: life expectancy had been much lower, and during the worst winters whole families had starved to death.

That’s not to say that the subsistence aspect of daily life has been completely ditched: Kaktovik’s annual whale hunt, carried out by the men in a flotilla of small boats, is the year’s social high-point, and caribou, seals and fish are still vital parts of people’s diet and culture. In fact, this conscious dependence on a clean sea leads to the one area the Eskimos do stand up and oppose the oil industry – in its moves towards offshore drilling. A spill under the ice would be nearly impossible to clean up, and would spell disaster for fish, whales and seals alike.

I was invited to a family house that afternoon. Jack Kayotuk was slicing up squares of beluga whale blubber in a bucket, a delicacy known as muktuk, when I arrived. ‘Yep, it’s mighty fine tasting stuff,’ he said approvingly, as I chewed some of it. It tasted like fishy rubber, fatty and impossibly rich. Jack carefully peeled the grey skin off the fat and pale-pink meat (it reminded me of pulling sticky tape off a roll). There was caribou and rehydrated mashed potato to go with it. ‘I’ve never been south of the Arctic Circle,’ Jack told me with a grin. ‘It gets too damn hot down there.’

I asked if he supported the oil industry.

‘Yeah, and I’d like to see oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge too. I think it would be all right for Alaska and for this town also. It would give us all the jobs that we need.’ He mentioned how high the cost of living was in remote communities where everything had to be flown in.

Later that evening there was a knock on the door of the Waldo Arms, the homely log cabin-cum-hostel where I was staying, and Ida Angasan came in, stamping the snow from her boots. Fifty-five-year-old Ida was Administrative School Secretary, and fond of talking to visitors. I fetched her a coke, and she plonked down on the sofa in front of the television set. The local channel was broadcasting rolling text messages to all the villages, about the weather, upcoming social events and so on.

‘I’m for drilling,’ she declared enthusiastically. ‘If they do it with safety and caution. After they drill I’ve seen how they put everything back together.’

I asked her why.

‘The main reason is my own students – they are our future. We need a new gym, we need a new school. It’s not big enough to have state championships for basketball and volleyball. I want a full-sized swimming pool too.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not asking for much, am I?’

‘What about the wilderness?’

‘I don’t live in the wilderness. I’m a hundred per cent Inupiat Eskimo. This is our land. We live off the land, we subsistence hunt, we do our three whales every fall…’

And had she noticed any changes in the local environment?

‘Oh, yeah,’ Ida began. ‘There’s no icebergs any more. When we used to go whaling there were icebergs – we used to get fresh water from them. Then in the past few years, it’s like all of a sudden…there’s no ice. It all melts away.’ She paused. ‘I think it’s endangering our polar bears, our seals, our ducks. I was in front of my house tonight and I saw this strange little bird – those birds come down from the mountains, so maybe it’s getting warmer out there.’