Oil Industry Misleading Americans About Alaska
Saving the Arctic Refuge from Oil Drilling and Spills Will Not Cost Hundreds of Thousands of Union Jobs
The oil industry supports drilling in the Arctic Refuge claiming that the industrialization of the wilderness there would create 735,000 jobs. This figure is as flimsy as an oil-soaked feather.
- The figure is based on a widely discredited 1990 study funded by the oil industry. This study is a disaster in scholarship. It is filled with errors, inaccuracies and irrational assumptions.
- The oil industry study used an unreasonably high estimate for the amount of oil that could be found beneath the Arctic Refuge. It assumes the refuge would yield 9.2 billion barrels of oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in 1998 that the mean amount of oil that can be economically recovered from the Arctic Refuge is 3.2 billion barrels. This amounts to about one-third of the oil industry estimate and less than what the U.S. consumes in six months.
- The oil industry study inexplicably concludes that drilling in the Arctic Refuge would lower the price of oil by 5 percent. Leading economists have stated that the world market determines the price of oil. Even pro-drilling Alaska Governor Tony Knowles said "Evidence overwhelmingly rejects the notion of any relationship between Alaska North Slope crude and West Coast gasoline prices." The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union said "The oil industry's claims.derive from an economic model based on the effects of presumed lower oil prices across the nation and is not a characterization of new, real oil patch or manufacturing jobs."
- The oil industry is using the highest estimate their erroneous study could dream up. Even the oil industry study, based on erroneous estimates and irrational assumptions, still provides a range of jobs that would be created from 250,000 to 735,000. The oil industry uses the highest, and most impossible, number.
- Other reports have reached vastly different conclusions. For example, a 1994 report by the Economic Policy Institute concluded that the most realistic number of jobs that could be created from drilling the refuge would be less than 8 percent of the jobs projected by the oil industry study.
- While the oil industry wants Americans to believe drilling the Arctic is pro-union, polls show that 62% of union households support protecting the Arctic Refuge. (NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Spring 2001)
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