Letter: Conserving oil is forward-thinking

Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006 | 8:21 a.m.

Mike Palmer, in his Jan. 21 letter to the editor, would have readers believe the government determines where any oil would go that is discovered in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Oil is a world commodity and will be sold wherever economics dictate, especially with oilmen in the White House.

How much oil is in ANWR is open to question, with advocates citing unrealistically large figures based on echoing each other's opinions, while a study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shows much more uncertainty about what, if any, oil even exists in ANWR.

The bottom line is that conservation stretches resources further into the future than destructive extraction, according to the same simple mathematics used for compounding interest on a mortgage.

If our political leaders from the '80s on had been farsighted regarding developing renewable energy sources, we would not be getting so much advanced technology in this area from elsewhere in the world. You have conservatives to thank for this shortsightedness.

Mark Schaffer

Las Vegas