An arctic wind cut across Prudhoe Bay, sending spindrifts swirling as Energy Secretary Chris Wright stepped onto a podium hastily erected among oil wells and pump stations. The gray summer sunlight scattered over ice-rimmed ponds, shadows gathering in the hollows of low heaves and stretching over the tundra. But the visitors gathered around him were less interested in the scenery than what lay beneath it.
Wearing a hard hat perched above a pair of safety glasses, Wright gripped a lectern with red-knuckled hands chilled by the cold air. “I want to say to all of you standing here today,” he told a gaggle of oil workers, “you are the greatest liberators in human history.”
Hovering nearby were Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was the kind of Cabinet-level entourage that made the remote industrial site feel like a campaign stop. They were on a multiday tour of northern Alaska, hyping plans for a pipeline that would carry liquified natural gas, or LNG, roughly 800 miles south to an export termi... Read more
