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Hot Takes in a Cold Place: Something Smells Fishy in Southcentral Alaska

Have you ever attended a public comment meeting that didn’t want the public to comment?  I have.  Six, actually.  All in one week! The owners of the Eklutna Hydroelectric Project held information–erm, “public comment”–meetings last week in Palmer, Anchorage, and Eagle River.  They were certainly “informational,” to say the least. Charts, numbers, and graphics, oh my. Cherry-picked information to intentionally …

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It’s baaaaack!

HB 398 creates more bureaucracy, expense, and red tape that strips Alaskans of our right to protect our waters. This bill is bad.

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Group of Alaskans call out EPA clean car rollbacks

A group of Alaskans, including elected officials and local advocates, are calling for a return to previous federal Environmental Protection Agency clean car standards. The EPA rolled back the standards for lowering the fuel efficiency and emissions standards for new vehicles in March. The rollback still increases the stringency of corporate average fuel economy and carbon dioxide emissions standards by …

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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 …

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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 …

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Just Transition Summit hopes to share ideas about moving away from single resource economies

A summit next month in Fairbanks hopes to build collaboration and strategies that address the challenges of relying on oil-and-gas development. Organizers hope that the Just Transition Summit – January 8-10, 2020 – provides a space for “Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration to build critical thinking around economic and social transition.” “Just Transition is an exciting concept … about building a …

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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 …

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Pebble Mine opposition: Wrong mine for the wrong place

Six rallies around the state this week have one purpose — spurring Alaska’s U.S. senators and representative to stop Pebble Mine permitting. The U.S. House of Representative passed an amendment last week that would suspend funding for permitting for the Proposed Pebble Mine project near Bristol Bay, and a rally held outside Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Juneau office Tuesday is part …

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Anti-Pebble Mine rally happening outside public hearing on Draft EIS

ANCHORAGE (KTUU) — Ralliers are gearing up to protest the Pebble Mine Project outside the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage, where a public hearing on the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement is well underway Tuesday evening. Five anti-Pebble groups are hosting the rally — Save Bristol Bay, The Alaska Center, Cook Inletkeeper, The United Tribes of Bristol Bay, and Trout Unlimited …

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Alaska Wants to Fight Warming While Still Drilling for Oil

Alaska’s appetite for oil is as ubiquitous as the state’s proliferating examples of a changing climate. The Arctic is melting faster than anywhere else in the world. Permafrost is thawing and releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Warmer air and ocean water have diminished sea ice. Native villages along the coast are moving inland to flee rising seas. But climate change …