Alaskans are constantly being reminded of what a distant federal bureaucracy will do on a whim.
On a Sunday morning last month, President Obama showed once again his determination to stunt our state’s development when he designated as a wilderness area the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
This comes after his executive actions to close energy leasing in Bristol Bay and the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. These decisions were all made without the support of Congress or Alaskan officials.
The decision doesn’t just affect Alaskans. Alaska is an energy artery to the United States. For more than twenty years, one-fifth of the nation’s oil production traveled through our Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). This despite the fact that 60 percent of our land is in federal hands, and seven of the ten largest National Parks are in our state, along with the largest state park in the country. Americans drive cars running on Alaskan crude, and then fly oil-fueled planes to enjoy our scenic lands and wildlife.
Every dollar that goes to Alaska is a dollar that doesn’t go to hostile, volatile regimes that undermine democracy in the world. And development has helped Alaska’s Native peoples thrive, raising their living standards by several orders of magnitude. Alaskan Native Corporations are now some of the state’s largest employers.
This should be a success story. Instead, our efforts to explore and harvest our own resources have been met by Washington’s hostility time and again.
To give one egregious example, King Cove, an isolated village in western Alaska, cannot even get a one-lane, twelve mile dirt road to an all-weather airport for the purposes of medical evacuation. That’s because the Department of Interior says the road would potentially harm a bird habitat in the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which the road would traverse. Alaska has offered to exchange 56,000 acres for the paltry 206 acres needed to obtain the right of way. But birds are more important than people to federal officials.
By the way, the federal land in Izembek is literally crisscrossed with existing roads used by bird watchers … and bird hunters.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain contains immense resource potential — ten billion barrels of recoverable oil — and the footprint necessary to develop it is no larger than Reagan National Airport. It is the equivalent to a postage stamp being placed on a football field, and it would significantly increase production levels, which have fallen off precipitously in recent years.
Congress recognized this value in 1980, when the coastal plain was specifically set aside for eventual oil and gas development in the same law that established a plethora of national parks, refuges, and wilderness larger than the size of California. This was the agreed-upon exchange: in return for all this land being conveyed and locked up, no more land would be taken off the table without Congressional approval.
Since that time, Congress has time and again voted to allow the development in the coastal plain. Time and again, executive actions through vetoes and orders demanded by the environmental lobby have prevented us from moving forward.
This is not just an overreach, it is a slap in the face. Alaska supports this country, has a record of responsible management, and yet is treated as a bad actor. Anyone who considers Obama’s actions appropriate should consider the hypocrisy of driving cars with oil imported from dictators while lecturing Alaskans on the ethical use of their own state’s land.
Cathy Giessel, a lifelong Alaskan, serves as a Republican in the Alaska State Senate, representing District N in Anchorage. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
