Kodiak Wind Farm. Photo courtesy Marion Owens’ blog, Dec. 2015.
As Alaska Governor Bill Walker approaches his reelection campaign next year, he is pulling out all the stops to pander to the usual suspects on the left. He announced reformation of Sarah Palin’s Climate Change operation in the Governor’s office in Juneau. Walker signed an administrative order creating the Climate Action for Alaska Leadership Team. https://gov.alaska.gov/admin-orders/289.html
Among other things, these guys are charged with established Alaska Climate Change Strategy to support the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goal 13, Climate Action. Being unable to find someone here in Alaska who is sufficiently wacked out about manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions, they hired someone from Seattle who commutes to and from Juneau.
Walker put our “esteemed” LtGov Byron Mallott, who is so enamored with his racial identity as a Tlingit elder that he has a difficult time talking about anything else, to head up the newly formed group.
The team will address mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions to decrease the state’s CO2 emissions footprint, evaluate risks and adopt measures to reduce vulnerability of Alaska citizens to climate change impacts, research ways to sell climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, plans and train for timely and robust responses to protect and address near term threats to communities and regions from climate change.
Somehow I don’t think they will be able to keep villages from building more stuff on barrier islands on the Arctic Ocean.
The team will work with all the usual suspects on the left (NGOs, University of Alaska system, and politicized government agencies) to prepare a plan of action due Sept. 1, 2018. The order repeals and replaces Palin’s Climate Change subcabinet.
Expect the team to attempt to shift Alaska from a petroleum economy to a renewable energy economy. If the experience of this foolishness in Oz over the last decade is any indication, energy is going to get very, very expensive up here in the very near future. http://joannenova.com.au/2017/08/australia-denmark-germany-vie-to-win-highest-global-electricity-cost-its-the-nobel-price-prize/
So a state with more coal than any other state in the union, centuries of natural gas, and as much oil in ANWR, NPR-A, and offshore in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas individually as we have found at Prudhoe over the last half century is going to ignore all of those and use wind, solar and tidal. Gonna need a lot of wind to stay warm when it is -50 F and dark outside.
This sort of virtue signaling is jaw-droppingly foolish and more than a little bit dangerous to those on fixed incomes and the less well off. But it is what the democrats want to do, which gives us yet another issue to discuss next year.
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He is a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
