If the federal government had not built the Alaska Railroad a century ago, Fairbanks would probably have disappeared from the map like so many other Alaska boom towns of the early 20th Century.

And Anchorage, a town created by the railroad and for the railroad, would have had no origin story at all.

In today’s dollars it was a $1 billion to $1.5 billion project, a massive decade-long undertaking significant enough to lure President Warren G. Harding to the ceremony marking its completion 100 years ago Saturday.

Read More

When oil prices collapsed in the spring of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the BP sale of its Alaska assets to Houston billionaire Jeff Hildebrand was in jeopardy because banks led by JP Morgan were scared off, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

The banks had earlier agreed to what would essentially be a loan backed by future oil and gas proceeds, the newspaper said, but the oil panic led them to pull the plug. Hildebrand, the owner of Hilcorp, wanted to fund the purchase with debt.

Read More

For the first time in 164 years, the U.S. Marine Corps does not have a leader confirmed by the Senate.

Sen. Dan Sullivan would be complaining long and loud about this as a serious threat to national security, but for one reason.

He can’t blame it on President Joe Biden or Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the woke left, environmentalists, reporters covering Congress, the dictators in China and Russia or people who understand the danger of climate change.

Read More

One lesson that Alaska can learn from Canada can be found in the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act, a 2015 law that mandates publication of payments made to governments in Canada and beyond.

These reports are an excellent source of information to contrast and compare how much Canadian mining companies pay governments around the world in taxes, royalties, fees, etc.

Read More

The University of Alaska and the governor’s office claim that Tuckerman Babcock’s term on the regents would last until 2031 and Seth Church’s term would last until 2027 if they are confirmed by the Alaska Legislature during the joint session of the Legislature.

Not exactly.

Their terms on the regents expire on the fifth day of the next legislative session.

Read More

Created in 2022 with excessive hoo-ha by the Legislature and the governor, the 36-member Alaska Food Strategy Task Force is getting off to a slow start.

At a May 26th introductory meeting, task force leader Sen. Shelley Hughes looked for volunteers to chair three subcommittees to compile rushed reports by July 15 on three major issues—growing the agriculture industry, growing markets for local products and improving transportation and infrastructure.

The 36-member task force was supposed to have started strategizing last winter, with a report due by the end of this month on three on three of the major challenges facing agriculture in Alaska.

We should add bureaucratic inertia and task force redundancy to that list, as this effort is repeating work done last year by the Alaska Food Security Task Force.

Read More

Wellspring Ministries of Alaska, an Anchorage right-wing religious organization led by Art Mathias, enjoys tax-free status under federal law.

Mathias’s church is a leading entity in the attempt to overturn ranked choice voting in Alaska.

On Dec. 16, 2022, Mathias filed papers in Washington creating a new church that is an “integrated auxiliary” of Wellspring Ministries. The leaders of the “church” are Mathias, his wife and Philip Izon.

The alleged “church” is called the Ranked Choice Education Association. The founders claimed to the state of Washington that the purpose of the “church” is to “promote Christian doctrines.” But it’s all about politics.

Read More

The proposed Tetlin mine would be among the highest grade open pit gold mines in the world, if not the highest, according to Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, the geologist and mine promoter who sold the idea to Kinross of trucking the ore nearly 250 miles across Interior Alaska to Fort Knox.

The ore is now expected to produce twice as much gold per ton as estimated in 2018 when a study said the capital costs of building mine processing facilities at Tetlin could be recovered in two years of mining. The after-tax internal rate of return was estimated at 29 percent with a grade of 4 grams per ton. Now the grade is expected to be 8 grams per ton.

Read More

How many 82-ton ore-hauling trucks per day will Kinross run between the proposed Tetlin Mine and the Fort Knox Mine?

The shifting estimates from the company show that this is, at least in part, a public relations matter.

Read More

In this corner we have Sen. Cathy Giessel and Rep. Zack Fields joining the promotional parade of oversimplistic claims about how to deal with China, ignoring what the cost would be to consumers.

And in this corner we have Rep. George Rauscher attacking the very idea of studying how much carbon dioxide is released in creating steel, plastic, etc., ignoring the cost of climate change or the consequences to consumers.

Read More