Dave Stieren, $156,000-a-year mouthpiece for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, took offense when I referred to him on Twitter as the Dunleavy education expert. Reading his comment about me being a “sad relic,” I pay no heed, considering the source.
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Sen. Dan Sullivan’s oversimplified claim that multinational companies—with operations and political connections in many countries—are nationalistic instruments of U.S. foreign relations is a dangerous delusion for a U.S. senator. These are companies that want to produce profits above all else for their shareholders. That is why they exist.
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You would never guess it from reading the resolutions and declarations of support about the Willow project from Alaska politicians and businesses, but development of the oil field would cost the state hundreds of millions a year during the early years of construction and production.
That’s because it is on federal land and the state would collect no oil royalties from the field, only production taxes. Equally important, the state oil tax law allows ConocoPhillips to write off the expense of developing Willow against its other operations in Alaska immediately, reducing how much it pays in taxes for up to eight years.
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In the infamous Pebble tapes from 2020, the chief executive of the proposed mine portrayed Sen. Dan Sullivan as someone who is “gonna try to ride out the election and remain quiet.”
Tom Collier lost his job over his impolitic remarks about Sullivan and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, but truer words have never been spoken about Sullivan.
The junior senator is always trying to ride out the election and duck contentious issues, clearly communicating a position only if he can pose it as an attack on Democrats or if it an issue on which he can’t possibly lose.
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Alaska Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor should be called to testify before the Alaska Legislature on why he hid a key change in state policy on civil rights in the midst of the last election.
We only know of this important change to reduce the civil rights of LGBTQ people because of excellent reporting by Kyle Hopkins for the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.
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Adam Crum evaded taking any responsibility for the food stamp crisis, offering bureaucratic babbling and jargon, suggesting the “limited leadership structure” was busy with higher priorities so things got out of control.
Read More“But Diggins does seem to have mastered the art of staying present in the pain. Tuesday’s race—an individual start competition, in which skiers go out on their own, at thirty-second interval—was a textbook example,” wrote Bill McKibben in the New Yorker.
Read MoreThree public comments have been submitted online to the state as of Wednesday morning on the waste management permit for the proposed open-pit Tetlin mine. Here’s how to add yours to the list.
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Kinross is telling Alaskans that it is not economical to build an ore processing facility at the high-grade gold deposit near Tetlin, so it has no choice but to use the highway system to truck ore to the Fort Knox mine for processing.
But there is good reason to dispute the claim.
Why?
Because a 2018 study of the proposed Tetlin project—before Kinross got involved—found that a mine project built at Tetlin would be an economical and profitable venture for all concerned, even with a gold price of $1,250 per ounce. Gold is now about $1,830 an ounce.
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The Dunleavy administration hadn’t planned to move ahead this soon with the replacement of five major bridges between Tetlin and the Fort Knox mine until the Kinross plan to use the highways as a haul road for mining trucks came along.
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