Charon's Landing Read Free Page B

built in the plains states and solar collector arrays set up in the Southwest. He proposed erecting a tidal power station off the coast of Maine that would provide nearly all the energy for the city of Boston.
    Because of its unusual electromagnetic properties, the recently discovered element bikinium would be used to multiply the output of current generating stations. Eventually it would become a source of power itself. The automotive industry, which had been sitting on battery technology for years because it wasn’t profitable, would be forced to fully develop electric cars. At the end of the President’s ten-year schedule, half of all vehicles sold would have to be electrically powered. He’d said that the technology was there; America just had to have the courage to use it.
    The President had given the nation a tough challenge, and they seemed eager to accept. The people were galvanized with the same sense of expectant optimism that President Kennedy generated when he promised to put a man on the moon. Environmentalists saw the glorious end to fossil fuel’s rapacious destruction of the ecology. Economists agreed that the transition period would be difficult, but the ban on oil imports would help end the nation’s decades-long trade imbalance. Technocrats were eager to see the emerging technology that would wean America from her dependence on oil. And the State Department was thrilled to see the Middle East’s diplomatic trump card, the threat of another oil embargo, taken away from them.
    Within a few short weeks of his plan, political reality reared its ugly head.
    The world’s seven major oil companies, known collectively as the Seven Sisters, have a combined economic power larger than many industrialized nations. They knew their largest market was about to vanish, and they began to exert their massive influence. In what amounted to economic blackmail, the Seven Sisters began bumping up the price of gasoline in ten-cent increments until it had nearly doubled. Then, they quietly made it known within the beltway that prices would continue to rise if certain concessions weren’t made. The President was realistic enough to know that the oil giants could spiral the global economy into a slide that would make the Great Depression seem like a boom time.
    By pulling in every political favor he had acquired during his terms in the House and Senate and making promises that would take the rest of his term to honor, the President pressured Congress to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration. The millions of acres of virgin tundra on Alaska’s north coast just east of Prudhoe Bay were the last major source of domestic oil and one of the most delicate ecosystems on the planet. The Arctic refuge was known to hold oil deposits many times larger than those found at Prudhoe, and it was a prize that the Seven Sisters had wanted for years. That was the price the Sisters demanded for their cooperation, and that was what the President got for them. The bill had been quietly tucked in with other legislation only minutes before passage, forestalling any debate on the floor. Environmental lobbyists and activists never knew what was happening until it was too late.
    Environmental concerns had always blocked earlier attempts to open the Refuge to exploitation. However, the President had no choice but to sweep those aside, knowing that he had negotiated for the lesser of two evils. He knew that no matter how many precautions the oil companies took in their scramble for this new source of crude, the land would be destroyed virtually forever. But he also felt that it was a small price to pay if his new policy led to a cleaner life for the rest of the country and eventually the world.
    He never expected the severity of the uproar when the nation learned of the deal. Overnight, it seemed every citizen became a champion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. People who couldn’t find Alaska on a map suddenly started