Oil : The Big Game Now Begins…

They were waiting for long, and like good professionals biding their time. With the blowing of the lid on oil price, a major event went past us nearly unnoticed. Mid-July, the Bush government lifted a 17-year-long ban on offshore drilling. The hope is that more production will ease the spiraling fuel price crisis.

The oil-hunters lost no time in going into top gear. Buried in the inside pages of the day's newspapers recently was a report on how the US Geological Survey is coveting the 90 billion barrels of oil that the Survey believes lies within the Arctic Circle. Of this, some 40 billion barrels have already been ‘found’ in the region.

There is a straight-faced earth scientist of the US who has the gumption to say the Alaskan platform really looms as the most obvious place to look for oil in the Arctic right now. The team of American Geologist believes that there are some 40 billion barrels of oil and a 1,000 trillion cubic feet of gas that have already been found in these Ice Caps. Is that all man can do to solve his greed for consuming more? Will there be a time, soon, when there will be a turn in the tide of the world’s consciousness to ensure that this insanity stops? Is it so difficult to see that if we hurt the Planet, we hurt ourselves and our prospect of life on Earth?

The desolate Arctic is one of the most sensitive regions of the world. Any damage now cannot heal at all. Worse, its impact on the rest of the world is going to be multiplied by the time the damage to the polar cap impacts the warmer girth of the Planet closer to the equator.

Over ten years, we have had reports of how the warmer Gulf stream that now coarses down to the Mediterranean has left many millions of aquatic species bewildered at changes in their old migratory routes that leaves them vulnerable. The increase flow of water to the Mediterranean is threatening the mighty Aswan which is beleaguered by the twin challenge of the rising waters from the North, and the increasing tide of silt that is building up on the side of the Nile.

-- Chandrashekar Hariharan
The writer is head of BCIL, a pioneer of green homes in India.