It's important to keep in mind the scale. The US is producing around 15 million barrels of oil per day.

The projects mentioned in the article, combined, would be less than 6 months of the US production.

It's important for the locals in Alaska, but it's not going to change anything globally. Except maybe killing off a few endangered species and damaging the fragile ecosystem. But that's a small price to pay for oil companies' profits.

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lazide 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Even close to 6 months of US capacity is huge.

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cyberax an hour ago | parent [-]

It is. But also not game-changing. And we don't have an infinite number of wildlife preserves that we can throw under the bus.

Arctic development is also expensive, and even the planned projects would have been impractical without already-existing infrastructure.

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lazide an hour ago | parent [-]

By that definition almost nothing is game changing?

The US is one of the most oil hungry countries on the planet, and even 3 months supply is a quarter. That would definitely move the needle on prices!

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cyberax 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

> By that definition almost nothing is game changing?

Yes. That's indeed correct. No amount of new oil discoveries or desperate attempts to put an oil well in every endangered species habitat is going to change the current trajectory.

The practically recoverable oil reserves in the US are estimated at around 150-200 billion barrels. That's about 30 years at the current production rate. Though not at the current price, a lot of reserves are economical only if the oil price is high enough.

So we'll still need to switch to something else in the long run, regardless of the CO2 pollution.

	▲	lazide 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Uh ok? That seems rather pointless as a comment on current affairs. This will change things for the foreseeable future, and is certainly going to move the needle over that time.