Guest Editorial

This is more about who will pay the cost of the president’s war on Iran and how it’s disrupting the global flow of oil than it is a history lesson about Alaska oil production. But stay with me as I run through the history to get to my point.

Think of it like setting the handle on the gas pump to fill up your tank and watching as the dollars spin by on the screen.

Decades ago, Alaska’s North Slope produced so much oil that the supply overwhelmed U.S. West Coast refineries. It required a choreographed system of tankers, barges and pipelines to find homes for all that crude, delivering to refiner...