Alaska has its own White Whale

To the editor:

I just recently realized that I am a crewman aboard the Pequod, Herman Melville’s famous whaling ship in the Moby Dick story. We have as our captain “Ahab” Walker. We are in a single-minded pursuit of a white whale of a pipeline that has been a legend since 1976. While we have harvested a number of other “whales” in the past, such as the Delta Barley Project, the Point Mackenzie Dairy Project, the Frozen Fish Plant, and a number of others, there will be no satisfying “Ahab” Walker until we harvest the Great White Whale of an LNG pipeline and sacrifice the Pequod (Alaska) and her crew (residents of Alaska). While our nearly bankrupt “vessel” has recently hired some high-priced “harpooneers” at hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece, we actually paid the crew (TransCanada) that had the knowledge to “harvest” the pipeline whale over $150,000,000 to “jump ship”. They were grateful to be paid to abandon the hunt for the elusive pipeline creature as they made a profit where there was no profit to be made on the doomed voyage in search of the whale of a pipeline.

They realized that to sell the product from the “whale” would be a losing proposition, as, when the capital costs of “harvesting the whale” (building the pipeline) are factored into things, each unit of “whale oil” (LNG) would cost more to produce and bring to tidewater than it would fetch on the world market. While many members of the crew of the Pequod still believe the fable that harvesting the White (Elephant) Whale will be their road to wealth, the landlubbers profiting from the hunt for the Great White Whale of a pipeline know better, and once the Great Permanent Fund is “collateralized” to finance the voyage in search of the mythical beast, most of the crew will realize it as well but it may too late to save the Pequod and her crew by then.

Ishmael

— Don Hepler

Meadow Lakes