The Dunleavy Administration has officially squashed hopes that it will pursue a broad vote at home effort anytime soon. The announcement by Lt. Governor Kevin Meyer that Alaska will not conduct a vote at home for the August primary. The legislature provided the Administration with authority, but no mandate to conduct a statewide vote at home in its COVID-19 response …
Leg With louie: To Bag or not To Bag
The Novel Coronavirus has caused changes in how we interact. With people, with time itself, and with things. Wearing or not wearing a mask in public has become a political act to some. Distillers of fine gin are now distilling sanitizing hand gel. Single-use plastic bags are temporarily rescued from their glide path to oblivion by frontline retail workers deeming …
Our economy won’t recover without child care reform
Economy means management of home. But the short-sighted efforts to “reopen the economy” reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of what a whole, healthy and functioning economy looks like, and a complete disregard for the foundation of home: our families. Our economic production is dependent upon child care, yet our economic model has neglected to put our home and families at the …
Leg with Louie: Toward an Electric Tomorrow
Imagine, some future day after a bruising legislative session, our legislators and staff head homeward from Juneau, in quiet vehicles that require little maintenance, have zero CO2 emissions, and that glide lightly along the highway. By the time they reached their home districts, all of the accumulated malice, rancor, and ill-will of a typical session would be gone, replaced by …
Leg With Louie: Building the new economy starts now
Yours may be cowboys, Willie, but my heroes have always been journalists. Even today, in the middle of the daily whirlwind of sheep-dip and gibberish from our highest officer in the land, with uncertainty on all horizons and a pandemic at our door, journalists are out there asking questions, arranging facts, allowing citizens a foothold of logic in the world …
Lucky to have member-owned electric service
Let’s take advantage of this. We in the area serviced by Golden Valley Electric Association are lucky in that we, the ratepayers, are actually member-owners rather than customers of a private, for-profit energy provider. This gives us several advantages, not the least of which is being able to vote for the directors of our co-op in order to influence the direction …
Anchorage nonprofit hosts open house on climate change
More than a dozen organizations will come together for an open house-style event to talk about climate change in Alaska on Tuesday. The event is hosted by Alaska Common Ground, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate community discussions on important public policy issues. “Climate change is obviously one of those issues,” said Kari Gardey, the program coordinator for Alaska Common …
Solar energy lighting up more of land of Midnight Sun
A new industry is lighting up Alaska. Anchorage residents in particular have seen solar panels going up on buildings in their communities in the past five years. But across the state, more Alaskans are turning to the sun to power their homes and businesses. Over the last four years, Arctic Solar Ventures in Anchorage has seen 200 percent year-over-year growth, …
A climate change wake-up call
The Anchorage Daily News recently published an article entitled, “It’s November, and Southcentral Alaska’s unusually warm fall has some plants putting out spring buds.” If that’s not a wake-up call about climate change, I don’t know what is. Of course, the scariest, hottest, smokiest, summer ever in Alaska should have been enough of a wake-up call about what may have …
Two more legal challenges brought to EPA’s Pebble Mine actions
ANCHORAGE (KTUU) – One day after five regional groups representing Alaska Natives, commercial fisherman, and economic development organizations filed a suit, several environmental groups filed two separate lawsuits today alleging the that the Environmental Protection Agency violated environmental laws. Trout Unlimited, a coldwater fisheries conservation organization with more than 300,000 members nationwide, filed its complaint Wednesday. The lawsuit claims that …