Action needed to save our economy

To the editor:

The trans-Alaska oil pipeline (TAPS) is wearing out. It is functioning 15 years beyond its expected lifespan.

BP is running it on an “operate to failure” basis, and it has been failing — note all the small spills. Last year in Livengood, an ice plug almost shut TAPS down for good. There’s no money to rebuild it, because ANWR and offshore aren’t happening. When TAPS goes, 85 percent of our economy goes with it.

And here we sit with nothing in place to replace the income. No gas pipeline. Nothing.

We could have been busy building our own gas pipeline these past four years if Sarah Palin hadn’t broken her word about building the All Alaska Gas Pipeline. We still might have made progress if [state lawmakers] Jay Ramras, Charlie Huggins and Mark Neuman hadn’t stuck their fingers in their ears.

Engineers told them years ago that all a bullet line could do is deliver horribly expensive gas, so here we have the big news, folks. Yep, that’s all a bullet line can do. We’ve wasted three years and $22 million proving something that was perfectly obvious and well-known before we even started.

Take a bow, Charlie. You, too, Mark Neuman. Ramras also — the three horsemen of the economic apocalypse. There should be a political equivalent of the Darwin Awards, and these three should win it.

If we don’t get busy and build the All Alaska Gas Pipeline Bill Walker is advocating, a large share of the Alaskan workforce will soon be unemployed. A very large portion of Alaska’s real assets, both public and private, will be on the auction block too.

The oil companies want it that way because they want to buy Alaska for pennies on the dollar. Who wouldn’t? So they have stubbornly delayed any action on a gas pipeline. And Ramras and Huggins and Neuman have all helped them do it.

These three men have endangered our economy, our jobs, our homes and our way of life.

So has Gov. Sean Parnell, so has Ralph Samuels.

Are we going to save our own skins, or not?

Anna von Reitz

Big Lake