Big Oil's Premier Front Group Launches Radio Shakedown on Senator Scott Kawasaki
The Alaska Support Industry Alliance is throwing a very expensive temper tantrum on the radio.
Rebecca Logan wants you to know she's worried about Fairbanks. 🙄
Big Oil's premier front group is sweating bullets over a potential dent in its profit margins. A leaked internal email sent yesterday by Alaska Support Industry Alliance CEO Rebecca Logan reveals a desperate, cash-fueled attempt to bully a sitting lawmaker.
The Alliance's new radio ad, blasting across Interior airwaves as of this week, tells Fairbanks families that Senator Scott Kawasaki is personally standing between them and cheap gas, wielding a "poison pill" of "millions in new oil and gas taxes" that will supposedly kill the spur line dead. Ominous music, presumably, optional.
The radio script:
After decades, Alaska's finally on the cusp of building the gasline - with a spur line that would bring affordable gas directly to Fairbanks.
Now Senator Scott Kawasaki is pushing a poison pill-millions in new oil and gas taxes that would kill this project. If he gets his way, the gasline dies and so does the chance to deliver affordable energy to Interior families. Tell Senator Kawasaki: pass a clean gasline bill. Don't risk the spur line.
Here's what the ad doesn't mention: the tax Kawasaki has been advocating for isn't some vague grab-bag "oil and gas tax." It's a narrow proposal to apply Alaska's existing corporate income tax to privately held oil and gas companies - the S-corp provision. That's it. Dunleavy calls it a poison pill; Glenfarne definitely doesn't love it, but "poison pill" is a talking point, not a fact, and The Alliance is laundering it into the Fairbanks airwaves as settled science.
Matthew Beck
Like Logan, U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan also called for legislators to pass a "clean" version of the bill. Nice to see everyone's talking points are aligned!
Also missing from the ad: HB 381 already guts the property tax on this project by 80 to 90 percent, no matter what happens with the S-corp fight. The spur line, the rate cap, the impact fund…those provisions aren't held hostage by Kawasaki's position. They're already sitting in the conference committee's draft compromise bill, the one Bryce Edgmon and company rolled out July 2, with a floor vote teed up for July 16. The "clean" version of the bill lingo that The Alliance invokes like scripture is a moving target that's been shifting for a month, and the spur line has survived every version so far.
By the way, the radio ad doesn't have a jingle because it doesn't need one. Logan specifically targeted it to those who already agreed with The Alliance and said the quiet part out loud: kill the tax, run the ad, put Kawasaki's name on it, and generate outrage. It's a pressure campaign and dirty politics at its worst.
