A Citizen’s Guide

To the editor:

Don’t build the gas line. Why ship it out? Instead, put turbines at the gas fields, produce electricity and run a high-voltage line down the center of the state and to Canada and then sell the electricity to them and the United States. Canada is selling electricity to the United States. Why do you think they want our gas to go through their country? So that they can get cheap natural gas to run their turbines and to sell electricity to the United States when we have shortages.

Think about this: When the gas and oil are gone, all we are going to have is a rusty pipe rotting on the tundra. If a high-voltage line is built instead, we could have wind turbines hooked into it from every mountain pass in the state and hydro-power plants that could be built along our rivers without damaging them. You don’t have to dam the whole river to run a water turbine.

We have some of the highest tides in the world and more coastline than any state for tidal generators. Israel right now has Freon exchange steam generators using the temperature differences in the Dead Sea. Freon boils at 50 degrees, and with our geothermal hot springs we could do the same during winter. Seasonal power sources of rivers and ocean tide dams could take 50 percent of their output to produce hydrogen for hydrogen-electric turbines during winter. And we’d still be selling power and making money.

Every time I hear our politicians talk of our oil, timber, mining and fishing industries, I wonder—do they understand what the word means. Industry means you produce or make something. We don’t produce or make anything. With unlimited electrical power, we could make our own steel (the iron is here) and our own wire (the copper is here). Why ship everything out? We should be shipping finished metal, plastic, rubber, wood, and products instead.

The technology is there for environmentally safe factories. Build on site where the raw material is, blend them into the terrain, put them in mountain, or underground.

Who controls our future, us or the oil companies?

David Kerner

Fairbanks