A protest against the LNG project at the 2025 sustainable energy conference. Photo: Lois Parshley.
As the U.S. war on Iran threw the world’s global energy markets into crisis this spring, Arctic Village was settling into a cold snap. The spruce trees were furled with snow, the air sharp enough to freeze the breath inside your nose. There are no roads leading out of this Gwich’in community in northern Alaska, and its fuel has to be delivered by plane. In other rural parts of the state, diesel is barged up rivers during the short summer. These logistical challenges make the war’s price spikes especially painful.
After the Strait of Hormuz closed, gas surged past $12 a gallon, says Tonya Garnett, a spokesperson for the Gwich’in Steering Committee, a group of tribal leaders. “Everything has to be flown into our community,” she explained, meaning prices shot up overnight—not only for heat and electricity, but also for basic necessities like milk and other staples.
That shock is part of a broader reckoning over Alaska's energy future. After decades organized around fossil fuel extraction, the state is having the kind of argument societies tend to have when the foundations of an old economic order start to wobble. The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence would find the conversation familiar: They understood that who controls a territory's resources—and who bears the costs of their extraction—is at the core of political power.
Many rural Alaskan communities are turning to renewables to save money, and to reduce their dependence on deliveries that can be cut off by weather or supply chain failures. The effort is small-scale, incremental, and often forced to be creative. Meanwhile, the state and federal government continue to double down on extractive development. Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy argues that Alaska must accelerate domestic oil and gas production to stabilize both the state’s economy and broader U.S. security. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at “unleashing” Alaska’s resources, reopening previously suspended leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and directing faster approval of energy and mining projects. His administration sees the state as key to expanding American oil and gas production, as it pushes for U.S. dominance in global energy markets. That language of national interest is much the same as the U.K. once used to justify managing the colonies' timber and fish and fur.
That approach centers on maximizing exports and profits. Yet Alaska spends more on energy per capita than any other state, making it vulnerable when the system that oil built begins to crack. Its communities can no longer afford the fuel they need, its utilities are running out of natural gas, and its school budgets are lurching into crisis. The state brings in less revenue from oil now than it ever has, reflecting both declining production and a 2013 overhaul that lowered production taxes—which was voted in by state legislators who simultaneously worked for ConocoPhillips, Alaska’s largest oil producer.
"We are an oil state," says Phil Wight, an environmental historian at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. But that’s no longer because the industry supplies the bulk of the state’s jobs or budget. In 2025, petroleum contributed less than 13% to the total state revenue. To cover basic government spending, it increasingly overdraws the Alaska Permanent Fund, a sovereign wealth fund created in 1976 to preserve oil boom revenues for future generations. "We're trapped in that petroculture, even though that industry continues to fail to deliver.”
Prof. Phil Wright suggests a new definition for Alaskan energy independence less oriented toward drilling. Photo: Lois Parshley.
At a time when other states and nations are rapidly diversifying their energy grids, Alaska remains caught between the oil economy that has defined it for generations, and competing visions for what comes next. “Since the early 1970s, we have defined energy independence as drilling more oil in this country,” Wight explains. Though the United States currently produces more crude oil than any other country in history, energy prices under a second Trump administration have soared, accompanied by ballooning inflation and record-high household debt. One of the Alaska’s largest utilities, Golden Valley Electric Association, where Wight was just elected to the Board of Directors, just hiked its rates by 60%. Speaking as a history professor, Wight asked, “Is this what independence is? Because it doesn’t feel like it.”
. . .
The question of who Alaska’s resources are meant to serve stretches back to the first lines drawn across the Arctic by officials in Washington, D.C. When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, little was known about its vast petroleum reserves. “We were sold from a country that took over us without our involvement, and sold to another country without our involvement,” says Garnett. The Declaration of Independence, written nearly a century earlier, did not extend its principles to everyone living on the land it claimed, calling the country’s original inhabitants “merciless Indian Savages.”
By the 1920s, as the U.S. Navy converted its fleet from coal to oil, President Warren Harding proclaimed a new petroleum reserve across the Arctic coastal plain. Based on its geological features, naval officials suspected it would contain strategic fuels and called dibs in the name of national security. "Without asking us, for it was our land, our federal government took from us 23,400,000 acres of land, an area roughly the size of the State of Indiana," Alaska Native leader Eben Hopson later recalled. "Government was often very painful."
From a young age, Hopson recognized that decisions in Washington were reshaping his home in ways that would outlast the people who made them. At the time, Alaska was still a U.S. territory. Even many white residents came to see the arrangement as colonial, arguing that decisions about Alaska should be made by the people who lived there. During the 1955 Alaska Constitutional Convention, delegate Ernest Gruening said, “Our charters of liberty—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—embody America's opposition to colonialism and to colonialism's inevitable abuses.”
In 1959, Alaska became a state with the assurance that it would give residents greater control over their resources. The new state was granted the selection of more than 100 million acres of land. As it moved to do so, Alaska Native communities objected that many of these places overlapped with areas they had long called home. They were ignored.
Less than a decade later, explorers struck oil on the North Slope. Hopson was one of the Alaska Native leaders who used the urgency of the oil rush to demand greater recognition of Indigenous rights. After the federal government imposed a land freeze until the growing dispute could be resolved, they won the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. In lieu of reservations, it established 12 regional for-profit corporations to manage roughly 44 million acres granted along with subsurface oil and gas rights, and nearly a billion dollars in cash. The idea was that Alaska Native people would be shareholders in their own land—becoming participants in the economy that had been extracting value from their home for decades.
Whether it worked depends on who you ask. Nauri Simmonds, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, says the corporations have come to be treated as the voice of their communities when they are actually financial institutions. That conflation has created a replica of the inequity it was supposed to correct, “the haves and the have-nots,” she says. Though tribal shareholders have a seat at the table, Simmonds argues the furniture was still built for someone else's purposes.
The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation has grown into the largest locally owned and operated business in Alaska. It supports oil development on the North Slope, including the Willow project, an $8 billion project environmental advocates call a “carbon bomb.” Simmonds, whose family is from Nuiqsut, a community in the middle of some of the Slope’s most prolific oil fields, has seen the costs of that development up close. Respiratory illnesses soared as wells crept closer to town. Lifelong hunters now struggle with subsistence in ways they never did before, as migration patterns shift and other disruptions transform the landscape.
During the Willow project negotiations, Simmonds says, residents negotiated a deal to protect about one million acres around Teshekpuk Lake, one of the Arctic’s most important wetland ecosystems. The agreement limited oil and gas development in the area, preserving a right-of-way for subsistence use and putting conservation decisions in local hands. In December of 2025, the Interior Department suddenly cancelled it. “They said, just kidding, you know, adding to the long list of broken promises,” Simmonds says.
Nuiqsuit Trilateral Inc., a nonprofit formed by the tribal government, city government, and the village’s Alaska Native corporation, filed a lawsuit in federal court. “Our community has always worked in good faith with the State, the federal government, and industry,” said Roxanna Oyagak, the group’s secretary, in a press release. “But we are insisting that the federal government honor the commitments it made.” In March 2026, a judge temporarily restored the agreement.
A boat launch at Arctic Village. Photo: Sean McDermott.
For Simmonds, the debacle clarified the conviction that real energy sovereignty would not be handed over in a federal leasing agreement or negotiated across a conference table. It would have to be literally generated at home. Across Alaska, some communities have already begun pursuing that vision through renewable energy projects. “What Alaskans need is solutions that are going to be fast and that are going to be efficient,” says Jennifer Hyde, federal engagement coordinator for The Alaska Center, a non-profit focused on environmental and civic issues. “Alaska just has so much to offer in terms of free, unlimited renewable potential.”
The group has helped amplify information about clean energy and resilience projects around the state. One of those is in Yakutat, a small coastal community in the state’s southeast, where rising diesel prices were straining budgets. The town’s school and public safety buildings’ aging heating system was expensive to operate and increasingly unreliable. It was replaced with a modern heat recovery system, which captures waste heat from the town’s power plant. It also routed heat to the town’s health clinic, one of the biggest energy users. In its first year, the new system saved Yakutat $270,000 in avoided fuel costs, says Katya Karankevich, senior project manager at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, who supported the project.
In the meantime, the Trump administration is supporting new lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an area that has been at the center of years of political and legal battles. In June, the federal government auctioned oil and gas rights in the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, sacred land for the Gwich'in. It’s the first of four sales mandated under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The sales are expected to generate as little as $3 million in federal revenue—a fraction of the $200 million the state has already committed to support exploration and development in the refuge. No major oil companies bid, but the state’s own development corporation did. This lopsided investment underscores how much public money has been committed to fossil fuel projects the market has failed to embrace.
“It's heartbreaking because these areas, each of them are so special in their own way,” says Simmonds, her voice wavering. The land has fed her community for longer than anyone can remember. “It feels like each time there’s a new project, the area that you feel like you can depend on or defend, it just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.”
With the state’s backing and the federal government’s enthusiasm for new leases, Alaska’s next wave of extraction is taking shape. ConocoPhillips has already broken ground on the Willow project. Santos, another major oil company, is pushing forward with the Pikka project, another oil reservoir that is expected to produce enough crude to generate 12.6 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Last fall, Trump also signed an executive order approving Ambler road, a proposed 211-mile industrial access corridor. The Tanana Chiefs Conference condemns it as “a fundamental threat to our people,” including condemning its disruption of faltering caribou migrations. The order simultaneously gave the federal government a 10% stake in Trilogy Metals, the company planning to mine the area. “This machine,” Simmonds says, “will never be satiated.”
. . .
“Beautiful Alaska, we love Alaska,” Trump said in his 2025 state of the union speech, before boasting about once again renaming Denali, the state’s highest peak, for President William McKinley. Back in April 2024, Trump had hosted over a dozen oil executives from companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil at Mar-a-Lago, where he reportedly told them they should raise $1 billion for his campaign, a "deal," he said, compared to the taxes and red tape they would avoid if he won. In other words, the federal agenda now shaping Alaska's future is being written in rooms as far away from the North Slope as Britain was from the American colonies.
The ideals behind the country’s founding—of natural rights, and people’s ability to govern the land they live on—have always been easier to proclaim than to practice. The history of Alaska, like that of much of the country, is of people still fighting to secure freedoms that were celebrated long before they were shared.
After Trump took office, Dunleavy said, “it’s like Christmas every day now.” As governor, he has long advocated for the Alaska LNG project, an 800-mile pipeline and export terminal that would be one of the largest infrastructure projects in the state’s history. In 2025, the state handed the private energy firm Glenfarne Group a 75% stake in the project, in a deal whose details have been kept even from Alaska's own legislature.
Denali National Park along the proposed ING gas line route. Photo: Lois Parshley.
Though independent analysts say it’s not economically viable, the LNG project is still being buoyed by up to $31 billion in federal loans and another $7.1 billion in federal tax credits. Meanwhile, the federal government has cancelled more than hundreds of millions of dollars in support for renewable energy projects in the state, stalling or canceling dozens of critically needed updates.
At an Anchorage “Sustainable Energy Conference” in May, sponsored by Glenfarne, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dismissed climate concerns. Outside the ballroom, Alaska has been warming far faster than the global average, which is reshaping its fisheries, prompting bird dieoffs, and “rusting” its rivers. Those changes mean that anyone who lives off the land has a harder time providing for their families. Local governments face bigger bills for sewer repairs, road maintenance, and other everyday infrastructure, as thawing permafrost heaves highways and breaks waterlines. “Energy independence is probably the number one way rural Alaska—and rural America—can weather all of these impacts,” Karankevich says.
The United States’ founding document declares the purpose of government is to secure the “Safety and Happiness” of the people—including, in practice, something as basic as being able to turn on the heat or the lights. In Alaska, that promise is decided in the grid. Renewable projects aren’t just about climate; they’re about not gambling on fuel arriving late, running out, or simply costing too much.
That is not the energy independence being sold by the officials in Juneau or Washington right now. Phil Wight, the historian, puts it more plainly. "The political project in Alaska statehood was all about keeping enough resources in the state to actually sustain local peoples," he said. "Increasingly it seems that we are failing to do that."
© 2026 Lois Parshley
Lois Parshley is a freelance journalist, and climate research director at Public Citizen.
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