From Alaska Headlamp: "Patience Is A Virtue"
| Husky to sell Canadian assets. Calgary Herald by Dan Healing.
EPA and Enviros begin Ak-LNG attack. Expect more. -dh Alaska buys equity in risky 2025 project. |
“Understanding … links between terrorism and the sale of oil into the world market … we seek to ensure that America and our allies have access to secure and abundant supplies of energy,” said Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (NGP Photo).
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The Whole Kit and Caboodle Our Commentary. Thanks to Dan Henninger, Wall Street Journal, for this brilliant opinion piece. (i.e. Left column. We concur with almost all of Henninger's points believing, however, that the Donald Trump comments do not improve the column.) We would also add that in the energy sector (See last paragraph, below left), a willful attack on the whole kit and caboodle of America's great fossil fuel wealth producing sector has been a major factor in the current American depression. Just name the project, and the administration has tried and/or succeeded in waylaying it, for example:
We have documented at length here, the Administration's evasion of:
While the current administration has "only" a year left in office, we fear that much more economic, cultural and national defense damage can still be wrought within the new year. We would add that many Alaskan citizens are also waking up to the damage being created by a socialistic state administration. We have seen little effort to date to dramatically slash state spending to meet the demands posed by Alaska's slashed revenue reality — 90% dependent on low priced oil. Instead we have experienced an anti-investment climate governor who has on a number of occasions threatened the creation of or increase in taxes on oil investors–major sustainers of the economy. So today, we expect to see the governor announce cosmetic (i.e. relative to a deficit approaching $4 billion) budget cuts, a variety of new tax initiatives and a reduction in oil investment incentive. (Announcement just arrived, early afternoon. We'll have more to offer readers tomorrow.) In this atmosphere, it is hard to fathom why legislative leaders would willingly agree with the Governor's siren call for state ownership and/or subsidy of gas pipeline and gas utility projects. We believe it would be both prudent and responsible for elected officials to sell its 25% project equity interest at the earliest opportunity (i.e. to a responsible, private, U.S. investor). The whole kit and caboodle of state decision makers is stepping headlong into risky and wasteful private enterprise projects at a time when their savings accounts are drying up along with oil revenues subject to worldwide price volatility. Irony is that even if the partially state-owned Ak-LNG project is built on (or, more likely after its scheduled start up date of 2025), that will be too late to meet the financial needs of a crashed state economy. Furthermore, as elected officials salivate (and, dare we say, "panic") over hoped-for gas pipeline riches they are ignoring other gas pipeline realities:
The best advice we can offer the whole kit and caboodle of Alaska's public officials is to refrain from entering the private sector's barnyard of competition, and do simply what they do best: administer a prudent and reasonable government while encouraging and giving incentives to investors who make a prosperous way of life possible. -dh |
Wall Street Journal Editorial: We are near the end of the seventh year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and by any measure the United States is a fractured nation. Its people are more divided politically than any time in recent memory. Personally, many are anxious, angry or just down.
Whatever Mr. Obama promised in that famous first Inaugural Address, any sense of a nation united and raised up is gone. This isn’t normal second-term blues. It’s a sense of bust.
The formal measure of all this appeared last week with the release of the Pew Research poll, whose headline message is that trust in government is kaput. Forget the old joke about the government coming to “help.” There’s a darker version now: We’re the government, and we’re here to screw you.
In a normal presidential transition year, voters would be excited at the mere prospect of new leadership. Instead, the American people are grasping for straw men.
Donald Trump declared for the presidency in June. The New York City prankster travels from state to state opening the nation’s political fire hydrants, and no one seems able to stop the result: years of pent-up political and cultural contempt pouring into the streets.
Nearly one-third of Barack Obama’s Democratic Party has migrated to aging Socialist Bernie Sanders. Sen. Sanders is evoking press comparisons to the presidential candidacy of Eugene Debs. Today there would be campus riots if a professor’s test asked students to identify Eugene Debs, a famous starched-collar Socialist 115 years ago.
Black Americans, who expected better, live in urban neighborhoods with soaring murder rates, angry marchers and confused police who are utterly alienated from the people they are supposed to protect. Young black men have the worst job prospects of any group in the U.S. The New Republic magazine’s cover this week says: “Why Hillary Clinton will do more for black people than Obama.”
Our political vocabulary is now uniformly stark. Presidential candidates in both parties have built campaigns around income gaps, a struggling middle class, immigrant phobia and back again, the war on terror. One of Mr. Obama’s claimed legacies is he prevented an economic depression in 2009. But we’re still in a depression.
Hope and change was the promise. What happened?
Screens on Kindle readers will crack paging through books explaining what Mr. Obama could have, should have and would have done. For now, the short version is enough: America and the world failed because they didn’t do what Barack Obama told them to do. For seven years, he has been instructing everyone on the “right thing to do.” If Mr. Obama seems down these days, it is because so many—from John Boehner to Vladimir Putin to the man in the street—persisted in doing the wrong thing.
Iran’s ayatollahs got the Obama message, though, and that deal is the legacy.
The other half of the non-domestic legacy is supposed to be climate change. His appearance in Paris this week was Mr. Obama’s last turn on the big global stage, barring a national crisis. Anyone watching the angular figure of the American president making nonstop pleas at the Paris climate summit this week had to be struck by a sense of what the French would call tristesse, a melancholy, even pathetic sadness.
He alone in Paris seemed to take seriously the notion that the climate windmills can be reset to less than 2 degrees Celsius above “preindustrial levels.” In the last of many public apologies for the U.S., Mr. Obama confessed that his own nation is a grievous “emitter.”
Liberals think the right is gloating at Mr. Obama’s end-of-term difficulties. No one is gloating. The nation is either furious (the right) or depressed (the left) at eight wasted, wheel-spinning years whose main achievement is Obama Care—a morass.
Mr. Obama will go off to do something else, but he leaves behind a country littered with public and private institutions in disrepute. Whatever the cumulative causes for this, a president bears responsibility for maintaining some bedrock level of respect for institutions that are the necessary machinery of the nation’s daily life.
Instead, Mr. Obama spent much of his presidency vilifying the private sector—banks, insurers, energy producers and utilities. (Read entire article here.)
Alaska Headlamp News & Comment
Patience is a virtue
Covered by the Fairbanks Daily News Miner and the Associated Press, Governor Bill Walker said Friday that he didn’t want to hold up a vote to continue work on the AKLNG mega project project while still seeking a commitment from ExxonMobil that he got from two other project partners.
An Exxon spokeswoman, Kim Jordan, said by email that the company has been working to find mutually acceptable terms to advance the project and remains committed to doing so. “We, and many others, have communicated to the state, these agreements take time to negotiate and complete,” Jordan wrote.
Walker seems to be pointing his finger at ExxonMobil, but the commitment he got from other partners appears to be an agreement to negotiate an agreement? The very fact that ExxonMobil and others voted for the 2016 plan is indicative of their commitment.
$850,000 for what?
Rigdon Boykin, a commercial attorney, who earned more than $850,000working as a negotiator for the state before his contract with the Alaska Gasline Development Corp. was terminated Nov. 30. Walker wouldn’t rule out bringing Boykin back to the project at some point. But for now, he said, “I don’t really see a role, necessarily, for him.” Asked about what Boykin had accomplished, Walker maintained the state got “its money’s worth Alaskans should be given the details of what work product we got for this money."
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