It may be difficult for Americans in the Lower 48 to fully grasp how much Alaskans benefit from their state's vast oil and gas deposits. Alaska is home to just over 20% of the nation's proven oil deposits and almost 18% of its natural-gas reserves. About 90% of the state's public revenue comes from oil and gas royalty receipts. Alaskans pay no state income or state sales tax. Instead, they receive an annual dividend from the state treasurer that comes directly from the oil industry. Over the past 25 years, the average Alaskan has received roughly $1,200 from the state each year. When fuel costs spiraled out of control in rural Alaska, instead of focusing on suggestions to help rural residents weatherize their homes or develop small-scale renewable energy sources, Palin wrote every Alaskan a second check for $1,200.
The downside of that dependency is that it's sometimes hard to distinguish the state government in Juneau from the energy companies that it regulates. The state's elected officials have always worked closely with oil companies--at times, too closely. In the late 1950s, bureaucrats actually hired an oil-industry lawyer--with the big oil companies paying his expenses--to write the new state's oil and gas lease laws. Palin's populist approach was the perfect complement to rising public discontent with Big Oil, and it was the main engine of her remarkable rise from small-town mayor to a place on the Republican national ticket.
After Palin lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2002, then GOP governor Frank Murkowski rewarded her strong campaign by appointing her chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, an obscure but important board that regulates oil-field production. In her short tenure, she gained attention not for her grasp of technical detail but for making public ethics accusations against a fellow board member who happened to be chairman of the state Republican Party. She resigned in protest, leaving the $122,400 job after a year. (He was later fined for, among other things, sending confidential information to an industry lobbyist.) But Palin emerged with the image of a bold reformer in a state where the interests of Big Oil and politicians had seemed inseparable.
By 2005, Scott Heyworth was back in Wasilla, eating pancakes in the mayor's breakfast room next to her husband Todd as they discussed her plans to run for governor. Palin was weighing whether to run as an Independent or a Republican, Heyworth recalls. His ballot initiative had passed in 2002, and he was in a good position to help either way. He organized a Palin fund raiser and turned over the names of 42,000 voters, largely independents who had signed his petitions.
Heyworth saw in Palin a potential ally against Murkowski, who was negotiating behind the scenes with major gas producers to build a pipeline across Canada--a move that critics feared would give too much away. Palin doubled down on her support for her friend's "all-Alaska gas line," and she soon appeared in full-page newspaper ads across the state, standing between a pair of popular former GOP governors who were also wary of Murkowski's ties to the Big Three. "There was Sarah Palin running with the big dogs," recalls John Bitney, a longtime GOP operative in the state. "It elevated her in stature."
Then Palin saw her opening. In October 2005, Murkowski fired natural resources commissioner Tom Irwin, a well-liked "unreconstructed miner," as one political observer calls him, for opposing concessions won by producers on the gas pipeline. Immediately, six of Irwin's top aides walked out in solidarity. The mass exodus created a firestorm, with editorial writers and politicians extolling the "Magnificent Seven" and calling the mass resignations the "Thursday-afternoon massacre."
; and what we can do to bring about rebuilding a coalition of nations to address the Taliban and Al-Quaida?
