No More Global NIMBYism

Obama’s offshore drilling decision should be used as a chance to shift environmentalism into the 21st century.

Last week, President Obama shocked environmentalists by opening millions of acres of the American continental shelf to oil and gas drilling. The announcement reminded me of a backpacking trip I took to Malaysian Borneo several years ago.

Stranded in the sweltering city of Kota Kinabalu with a day to kill, I wandered inside the state museum to escape the equatorial sun. The main part of the museum itself was underwhelming. I walked the floor devoted to past heads of state, a section of interest only to those with a weak spot for campy, post-colonial propaganda. After an hour of staring at dusty old photos of primary school classes, wedding receptions, overseas vacations, and smiling handshakes with mid-level foreign dignitaries, I was ready to leave. That was when a guard directed me to the new wing of the museum.

The new wing, sponsored by an international oil company, was devoted to the wonders of petroleum. A shiny, multimedia exhibit introduced the visitor to petroleum geology and the many methods of exploration, drilling, recovery, production, transportation, and refining.

The exhibit also highlighted the social and environmental benefits of exploration in Malaysia's offshore waters. One colourful display boasted that corals sometimes grow on the legs of the massive offshore drilling platforms in the South China Sea, creating artificial feeding grounds for fish. Another told of company's work on sustainable development, albeit without any examples or explanations other than a few images of employees donating blood and teaching schoolchildren how to use fire extinguishers. There was no mention of the environmental impacts of Malaysian oil production, nor of the global climate impacts of oil use.

The most memorable part of the museum – better even than photos of former head of state Tun Sakaran bin Dandai's family trip to Egypt – was the dunia tanpa minyak, or "world without oil" display.

There, the visitor received the petroleum industry's equivalent of the Charles Atlas treatment. The first panel featured children playing in a colourful den equipped with a TV, VCR, vacuum cleaner, and telephone. The second, oil-free, 97-pound-weakling panel featured naked, dejected-looking children in an empty white room.

Let’s be clear. Obama’s decision to permit offshore drilling is about winning votes for upcoming climate legislation. It is not about sound energy policy. The amount of recoverable oil on the outer continental shelf of eastern North America and the Gulf of Mexico is far too small to have any meaningful impact on U.S. oil imports, let alone provide that political Holy Grail of energy independence.

The environmental community is crying foul over the move. It’s a shame, because this decision represents an important opportunity to shift the environmental movement into the 21st century.

For years, far too much of the environmentalism movement has been rooted in old-fashioned "not in my backyard," arguments known as NIMBY-ism. These worked fairly well when the issues were things like protecting the local park from a new roadway.

But in today’s globalized world, in which raw resources, goods, and services are openly traded from Anchorage to Zanzibar, in which resource extraction and pollution are causing global environmental crises such as climate change and fisheries collapses, we need to think beyond our backyards and beyond our coasts.

The opposition to oil exploration on the outer continental shelf is little more than a global form of NIMBYism.

Banning domestic oil exploration without reducing oil demand, like banning logging in national forests without reducing pulp and paper use, only exports the environmental impact of that resource extraction – in the case of oil to places like Malaysia, where the public has less power to stop environmentally destructive resource extraction. Is the American continental shelf more valuable than that of Malaysia? Or Indonesia? Or Nigeria?

Drilling on the outer continental shelf may be a poor option because of the low amount of recoverable oil and because it distracts from the real issues Americans are facing. But those of us living in the most consumptive of continents need to face the reality of the 21st century.

This drilling decision could be a watershed moment for the environmental movement. Environmentalists can sit on the sidelines and despair over the lack of rational political discourse on climate and energy policy, or they can get out there and talk about the linkages between local consumption and environmental degradation abroad – about the cascade caused by our decisions.

Let’s use this decision to talk about protecting coastlines around the world, not just at home. And let's use it to find the real, equitable answers to climate change and future energy needs.