Midnight Oil

Which side is Lisa Murkowski on? Alaska’s senior senator faces an impossible balancing act: How to reconcile her state’s dependence on the oil industry with the fact that Alaska is extremely vulnerabl...

16 Aug 201826min

The Alaska Native village of Newtok is disappearing. It’s rapidly losing ground to a combination of thawing permafrost and coastal erosion and residents worry their traditional way of life could disap...

9 Aug 201828min

On August 9, Alaska's Energy Desk launches our second season of Midnight Oil. It's called The Big Thaw. And it's about one of the biggest challenges facing the state right now and in the years ahead: ...

27 Jul 20181min

Today, the trans-Alaska pipeline carries a quarter of what it did in its heyday. And so Alaska is facing the question its been ducking for forty years: Will we always be an oil state?

8 Aug 201719min

The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds and brought commercial fishing in some of Alaska’s most productive waters to a standstill. It’s often talked about as an unp...

1 Aug 201722min

Less than ten years after oil started flowing, Alaska’s economy cratered. The recession was quick and deep. Ten banks failed, real estate values plummeted and tens of thousands of people fled the stat...

25 Jul 201719min

In Alaska, we don’t pay income tax. We don’t pay state sales tax. But once a year every man, woman and child gets a cut of the state’s oil wealth. There are plenty of other oil states in the world, bu...

18 Jul 201721min

The trans-Alaska pipeline was the largest privately-funded construction project in the world, built across the biggest U.S. state and faced with unprecedented natural obstacles. It came with an $8 bil...

11 Jul 201721min