What Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has to say about the environment
and drilling in Alaska Wildlife Preserve

My Environmental Guilt
----------------------

Lately I've been getting flamed by people telling me I shouldn't
put my political opinions in the comic strip. This surprised me
because I didn't know I had any political opinions. In one recent
comic I depicted an Elbonian oil worker drilling through the back
of a unicorn. Apparently something about that psychotic mess
looked like an opinion about drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife
Preserve.

It's hard to have a righteous opinion on the environment when
you're as selfish and uninformed as I am. On one hand, I'm a
cat-loving vegetarian who ought to care deeply about the caribou or
koala bears or bats or whatever they have in Alaska. On the other
hand, I live in California so I'd be willing to squeeze
schoolchildren to death if I thought some oil would come out.

I might feel different if I planned to visit the Alaskan Wildlife
Preserve anytime soon. But I don't know what I would do once I got
there, aside from praying that I froze to death before I got eaten
by a caribou, or a koala bear, or a bat. I've seen pictures of the
Alaskan Wildlife Preserve and I can sum it up in just two words:
North Dakota. Do we really need two North Dakotas? I mean, we
already have South Dakota as an emergency spare.

I don't know whom to believe about the number of critters that will
get hurt by drilling in Alaska. The oil companies want me to
believe that the drilling crews will be giving backrubs and
chocolate to the penguins, possibly taking them to formal dances.
The environmentalists want me to believe that herds of caribou will
be squeezed into a single windowless igloo and forced to make
sneakers out of their own hide for ten cents an hour. My confusion
is compounded by the fact that I ran over a squirrel yesterday
while taking my car into the shop. I don't know how that's
related, but it seemed worth mentioning.

Many questions remain.

Will more animals die during, a) oil drilling in the Alaskan
Wilderness Preserve, or b) production of footwear for the
protesters?

How much oil is in the ground up there in Alaska anyway? In your
heart you know that somewhere there's a guy in a cubicle who had to
come up with an estimate for his boss. He probably didn't have the
budget to do the kinds of tests he wanted to do so he just flew up
there, stomped around in a big furry outfit, stuck some poles in
the ground, and proclaimed it to contain five billion barrels of
oil. He knew he'd be working someplace else before anyone was the
wiser. As the data worked its way up the chain of management, every
manager tacked on a few billion barrels to puff up his own
importance. Now we're pretty sure that the entire planet Earth is
comprised of nothing but two inches of topsoil covering a huge ball
of oil.

To summarize my political opinions:

1. I don't like unicorns
2. There is no oil in schoolchildren
3. Everyone on earth is a lying weasel