In his never-ending advocacy for environmental extremists, President Joe Biden has issued one dictator-like ruling after another, specifically targeting Alaska and ruining economic opportunities for our hard-working families. No other state has been singled out like Alaska in Biden’s radical agenda, and perhaps no other senator has been as complicit in the assault on her own constituents as Lisa Murkowski.
In exchange for the approval of Washington, D.C. insiders and the praise of the corporate news media, Murkowski opposed President Donald Trump in both of his campaigns and fought him throughout his presidency. In doing so, she helped pave the way for Biden in 2020, even though she represents a state which Trump carried twice by double digits.
Alaskans supported Trump for many reasons. He was the first to open certain parts of Alaska for oil and natural gas exploration after a battle that spanned six decades – a feat not even Ronald Reagan was able to accomplish. Trump recognized Alaska’s innate right to self-determination, and he removed roadblocks – in some cases, literally – to our ability to grow our economy and create opportunities for our people.
Biden is reversing all of that, removing our capacity for self-reliance by pursuing authoritarian policies that effectively render Alaska a national park for the rest of America. On his first day as president, Biden halted the oil and gas leasing approved under Trump. Five months later, Biden worsened the blow by suspending leases that had already been sold, with the Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland, leading the charge. (In mid-June, a federal court blocked the Biden administration’s suspension of the leases, pending the outcome of 13 states’ legal case against the administration.) Biden’s actions surprised no one because he campaigned on these ideas; he’s making good on his promises.
What’s troubling is that Alaska’s own senator, Lisa Murkowski, is an accomplice to it all. Murkowski was the deciding vote in the Senate committee that advanced Haaland’s nomination as Secretary of the Interior. Now confirmed and in office, Haaland is Biden’s hammer for the environmental policies bludgeoning Alaska.
Not only does the lease suspension crush Alaska’s economic viability and devastate workers, it actually harms the environment. No one is under the illusion that demand for fossil fuels will decrease, so the resources will just come from somewhere else that does not produce energy as “clean and green” as Alaska does. The unrealized energy jobs will simply be shifted elsewhere – like Russia – while Alaska still sits on a massive, untapped reservoir of resources that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunity.
In considering this, some perspective of scale is also required. If you envision the location of the leases – the Artic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) – as the size of a baseball field, the area that contains the proposed drilling would be the size of a small desktop monitor on that field. Polls show that 80 percent of Alaskans favor energy exploration in ANWR, with the understanding that we care about our own environment far more than some bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.
Murkowski feigned shock and outrage at Biden’s decisions, but Murkowski could not be bothered to sign a May 2021 letter authored by 13 other Republican senators opposing the administration’s energy policies.
While it does not make the same headlines as suspending energy exploration in ANWR, Biden also has stealthily encroached on Alaska’s control of our own land. While President Trump was in the process of transferring 28 million acres of federally controlled land to Alaska, Biden intervened and stopped the plan. Once again, we hear from Murkowski’s beneficiary, Sec. Haaland, who is now in the process of seizing 44 million more acres, taking more land from us on the way to federalizing nearly 73 percent of our state.
We are owed land by the federal government, Biden and his band of environmental radicals are keeping it from us, and Murkowski’s fingerprints are all over it.
In another offense, Biden overturned another Trump policy against our wishes when he moved to reinstate the “roadless rule” for the Tongass National Forest. We had welcomed the economic boost from both tourism and timber production that access to the forest provided, but our overlords in D.C. have again decided that we cannot build roads in parts of our own state.
This federal intrusion is spearheaded by a different member of Biden’s cabinet – Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack – who also bears the Murkowski Seal of Approval. She voted to confirm his nomination while our other senator, Dan Sullivan, voted against him.
Most recently, Biden nominated environmental extremist Tracy Stone-Manning to be the Director of the Bureau of Land Management. Stone-Manning has collaborated with eco-terrorists, and, like Haaland, she opposes all oil and gas development. With this nomination, the radical Biden administration’s consistent, predictable assault on Alaska continues.
I’m running for the U.S. Senate because I love Alaska and am grateful for the opportunities my family found here. My parents struggled after they came to Alaska in the 1970s – even experiencing homelessness for a time – but they were able to fight their way into the middle class, largely thanks to a resource-development job. I’m concerned that similar opportunities for today’s Alaska families are becoming less and less available.
As the Biden administration’s attacks on Alaska mount, it’s time we had a senator who will stand up for us, rather than aiding and abetting the Washington, D.C. insiders.
Kelly Tshibaka is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Alaska.