Focus special session on natural gas crisis

Sen. Lyda Green and Sen. Charlie Huggins are way off base trying to hamstring the forthcoming special session. They are attempting to encumber the special session with bills dealing with abortion and parental rights. The special session was called to focus specifically upon natural gas pipeline issues.

Why is the abortion debate raised at this time, when the Legislature had the recent session to deal with these bills? Who was it that chose form over morality and kept the bills in committee during the session?

Who put process over the party platform? Who played politics with these bills?

Sen. Lyda Green and Sen. Charlie Huggins.

I am pro life and pro parental rights. These bills were important, but they should have been dealt with during the regular legislative session. That these bills were held in committee in deference to process was an act of outright cowardice on the part of the Republicans involved.

The special session is important. It was called by the governor to deal with the AGIA (Alaska Gasline Inducement Act) process, and, hopefully, to recognize and to deal with the looming crisis of Cook Inlet’s declining natural gas reserves by seriously considering options —solutions, not rhetoric.

To mire the special session in the abortion and parental rights debate when the special session was called to focus on the natural gas pipeline issues was tantamount to a thinly veiled subterfuge to derail the special session and to doom it to failure beforehand. Anything to derail AGIA.

Senators Green and Huggins have never supported a solution to moving our natural gas to market that was not of the producers’ devising.

What is it about the crisis over declining Cook Inlet natural gas reserves that these two and their legislative cohorts cannot figure out? Agrium is out of business; 65 jobs lost in Kenai.

The LNG plant at Nikiski is scheduled to close next. More jobs lost, more revenue to the state lost.

There is open discussion by the oil companies regarding the need to import natural gas from foreign sources to meet Southcentral’s heating and power generation requirements. Why?

Cook Inlet’s natural gas reserves are about gone. And, there is no immediate solution, save one.

Our politicians cannot seem to focus on the Cook Inlet natural gas issue long enough to figure out that North Slope natural gas is the solution, and that Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority’s bullet line is the only proposal on the table that can provide natural gas before Cook Inlet reserves dwindle to the point that importing natural gas from foreign sources will become necessary.

What are Charlie and Lyda doing about mitigating the impact upon you and me of the rapidly dwindling Cook Inlet natural gas reserves? Nothing.

You think that the cost of motor fuels have gone up? Wait till the oil companies start importing natural gas from Indonesia to Nikiski to heat your home and to provide natural gas to fuel power generation at the Beluga power plants. You will see an increase in your heating and electric bill that will knock your socks off.

Alaska still has a chance to avoid a recession, if our political leadership can stay focused on the gas line issue long enough to get something accomplished.

ANGDA’s natural gas pipeline proposal is a project that would benefit Alaskans by using Alaska’s natural gas resources in-state. ANGDA’s bullet line is the only option that will avoid the embarrassment of having to import foreign gas into a state with an estimated 135 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves languishing under the North Slope.

This special session is an opportunity to have the ANGDA option considered. Sarah Palin did the right thing keeping the abortion argument out of this special session. I know that it must have been difficult for Governor Palin to make that decision, given the way she feels about abortion and parental rights. That is called leadership. That is why we hired Sarah Palin to be our governor.

Now, if Governor Palin will just keep ANGDA in mind when she gets the wayward boys and girls of the Legislature together in June, and if she can get them to focus on the idea that if Alaska imports natural gas, their names will be mud forever in Alaska history; then, maybe, just maybe, these folks will do the right thing.

Larry Wood is a resident of Palmer.