If you live in King Cove, Alaska, you hope that bad weather isn’t happening if you’re having a medical emergency.  If that’s occurring, you can’t drive to the nearest airport to get to life-saving transport to Anchorage.  You must take a boat to Cold Bay, whose airport can handle jet traffic.  That ride can be treacherous, and many times, the sick can’t travel safely that way, either. There has been a decades-long fight to allow a road to be built between the two communities, because a short portion of it would cross the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.  During the Trump…

Railing against the U.S.’s continued actions that have led to increased energy imports and less domestic production, Alaska Republican Senator Dan Sullivan and others have made it clear: when it comes to exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), our country should be leading, not following others. The Senators penned a letter to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Rham Emanuel, encouraging more investment in natural gas infrastructure among G-7 nations. The G-7 includes the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada. According to the Washington Examiner, “There remains a gap between the political commitment to backfill the supply of…

We’ve seen many proposals from the eco-left over the years that had us scratching our heads and pondering how anyone could think they were good ideas.  This one from Alaska might take the cake. Late last month, during a meeting of the Alaska Legislature’s House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Andrew Gray (D-Anchorage) asked the following: “I kind of have the ultimate CCUS [Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage]: Is it possible under some circumstance for us to get paid not to take oil out of the ground? And my brief sort of crazy idea is to just sort of, if…

With anti-development ideologues barraging the Department of Interior and the Biden Administration to deny final approval on Alaska’s Willow development project, the Alaska Legislature has begun to return fire. Meeting on President’s Day, the Alaska House passed House Joint Resolution 6, titled “Supporting oil and gas leasing and development within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska; and urging President Biden and the United States Department of the Interior to approve the Willow Master Development Plan”.  All 36 members present that day approved the resolution, sponsored by Rep. Josiah Patkotak of Utqiagvik. The resolution is scheduled to be heard in the…

The rhetoric being thrown around by the eco-left has reached a fever pitch these past two weeks.  Their target?  180,000 barrels a day of oil production – for 20 years – that the Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska would provide. Not satisfied with simply winning a re-review of the project by using their political clout and influence, those fighting the project are demanding the Department of Interior – and by extension, the Biden Administration – shutter Willow altogether. Never mind that the project is in a Congressionally-authorized development area.  Never mind that the project has already…

Give an extremist an inch, and they immediately try to figure out how to take a mile. When the EPA declared a (preemptive) veto under section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act, denying the Pebble Mine the opportunity to move forward with its permitting process, we wondered aloud how quickly the process would be weaponized. It took less than 48 hours. EPA’s announcement on Pebble stated that the “extraordinary” action had only been issued three times in 30 years.  That won’t matter to extremist organizations looking to thwart American development opportunities. Case in point? The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council (SEACC)…

The Environmental Protection Agency announced that Alaska’s massive Pebble deposit wouldn’t be allowed to discharge tailings or mine waste into a 300-square mile area of the state, effectively eliminating the project’s opportunity for development for now. The extraordinary measure – used only three times by the EPA in the last 50 years – was quickly cheered by radical environmentalists and anti-development groups; the same ones who consistently rally for increasing ‘green’ energy, that Pebble would have been a major source of copper, molybdenum and rhenium for. Laying aside a clean Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), which was completed and announced…

Earlier this week, the Biden Administration – through the Department of Agriculture – continued its quest to rid America of domestic energy jobs when it reinstated a jobs-killing regulation called a “roadless rule” in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Overriding the wishes of Alaska’s Congressional delegation, the Native people living in the area and many advocates for sound forestry management, the reestablishment of the rule closed off nearly all of the 16.7 million acres from development of any sort.  Hundreds of current jobs, and thousands of potential ones now await the outcome of pending federal litigation.  However, as damaging as that…

Let’s be clear: America doesn’t need to cede any more power, influence, or control to China.  We’ve already allowed the Communist Chinese to exert its manufacturing and supply-chain might over the world.  Giving it any more opportunity to expand its hold in the U.S. is bad news. Alaska nearly made this mistake in 2017, all because of a misguided priority by then-Governor Bill Walker. His legacy as Alaska’s chief executive was forever tainted by a decision to bring the Chinese government in as a financial and strategic partner for an 800-mile liquified natural gas (LNG) pipeline. Market economics made the…