Robyn's role on Team 9

A BRIEF QUOTE:

For the next 25 to 30 years, our children, our way of life, our standard of living demands that we do right and that we use that little, tiny piece of real estate without doing damage to this gigantic wilderness to produce energy for our great country. -- US Senator Domenici, quoted on NPR's All Things Considered, 19 March 2003. ProQuest document ID: 326109811

I am a member of Team 9: Political Ramifications. As a group we are focused on:

• how drilling in ANWR will affect the way the US relates to other countries
• what implications the decision will have within the US congress (on future energy policy and near-term efforts to decrease GHG emmissions)
• what impact the addition of ANWR oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would have on national security
• whether the amount of economically recoverable oil in the 1002 region will change the dynamics of the US-OPEC relationship
• the local politics of the decision from the perspective of native Alaskans
• how the interests of oil companies compare to the interests of individuals (senators, oil workers, native people, the general populous, congresspeople who may have been elected based on their view of this issue, etc...)

Some questions to ponder:

• National Security
• What does oil mean to the US military?
• Would the 1002 oil be added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
• Are we motivated to reduce our foreign oil dependence because we seek economic autonomy or a cleaner environment?
• What part of the US government will get to decide how to use the oil? If there are multiple possibilities, what are the causes of each?
• Public Awareness
• How are we (the populous) supposed to sort through the various appeals that get made to our conscientiousness/commitment to future generations/interest in sustaining the economy/support for low-wage oil industry workers?
• Propaganda can inflate and deflate the importance of concerns that are in reality very difficult to rank. Also, certain seasonal factors affect which topic will be the most important at any given time (oil prices, water shortages, housing prices, the health of the economy, whether taxes were just due last week, etc...).
• How can these influences be measured quantitatively?

20 Oct 2003		Today I attended a lecture at Harvard entitled "Six Years After Kyoto: Where Are We Now? Issues, Challenges, and Partnerships in Global Climate Change." I wrote a brief summary of the talk and included a discussion of how it relates to my research.
15 Oct 2003		So, I'm pretty behind with updating this website. By Saturday afternooon I plan to have filled in the gaps from the beginning of October. This essentially means transferring summaries of my hand-written notes onto the web. It shouldn't be much of a problem. I'm sorry I have not been diligent about site upkeep. Today, our group met to discuss our schedule for presenting our topics to eachother. My topic is more on the international side of things -- specifically, what precedents will be set in terms of international action against global warming if the US chooses to drill in ANWR... and, later, how the US decision could be optimized to have the most beneficial impact on world-wide efforts to counter greenhouse gas emissions. Something we've discussed in our group meetings has been the idea that if we increase fuel efficiency now, then the difference in domestic oil use over the next n-year period will be essentially equivalent to any gain ANWR oil might bring us at current standards over that same period. We know we need to be constantly increasing efficiency anyway; the argument is that by stepping up efforts at the moment we can generate the same effect that oil flowing from the 1002 region would.
13 Oct 2003		The alumni dinner was tonight and proved extremely beneficial. Some important topics: the absolute nature of the Kyoto Protocol, idea that high tax on ANWR oil won't discourage developers since what isn't economically feasible today might be tomorrow, conservation for conservation's sake versus cold hard jobs in the very near term (weighing immediate human welfare against a potentially intangible benefit later -- in particular, a difficult-to-fathom world oil shortage for later generations, but not the present).
28 Sept 2003		Today I searched the ProQuest database for a little while. Document number 362040171 was surprising; it describes how the Smithsonian Museum changed its attitud toward an ANWR photo exhibit after some pictures from it were cited in a political setting with regards to whether or not ANWR should be opened for drilling. I can see why the Museum would take the actions that it did -- especially in light of the fact that it gets funding from Congress. I had kind of a crazy idea today... I think we should hold weekly debates about whether or not to drill in the 1002 region. The rules: you can't make a point that has been brought up in a previous debate teams of three post-debate analysis to decide whether any important new topics came up The idea is that if you know you will be responsible for making a brief argument each week for one side of the debate you'll have to see patterns in your research and be constantly aware of the sneaky political tactics that get used left and right in our nation's capital.
11 Sept 2003		Preliminary research has begun.
10 Sept 2003		This is my entry number two.
09 Sept 2003		This is the first entry. Today I learned about tables in HTML and created this webpage. Welcome. Googol is one of my favorite numbers.