Terry Chapin's return to climate action committee is a step in the right direction, but not nearly enough

Aaron Lojewski, new presiding officer of the Fairbanks borough assembly, made a mistake in removing all members of the climate action committee for no good reason.

Lojewski, who has opposed efforts to adapt to climate change, should have allowed the public process to continue without his interference and permitted the volunteers to finish their work and present it to the assembly.

Then Lojewski and others could amend the plan or vote against it.

But Lojewski privately chose six friends and right-wing allies who think the way he does—that the borough should never have spent $79,000 on this project—and appointed them with no public notice right after he was named presiding officer in November.

One of those he chose, Kevin McKinley, a GOP activist who has run losing campaigns for the Legislature and assembly and is the owner of a tattoo business, clearly had no idea what he was getting into.

Like all the others chosen by Lojewski, McKinley did not attend meetings or participate in the creation of the draft plan the committee has worked on for more than a year. McKinley has resigned from the committee.

On Wednesday, Lojewski replaced McKinley with Terry Chapin, one of the former members of the committee who had been summarily dismissed by Lojewski in November for no good reason.

Chapin is an internationally recognized scientist and author from Fairbanks who will be an asset to the new committee, no matter what shape its final report takes. He is a even-tempered person with plenty of patience and is an expert in this area.

While all members of the committee, which was almost finished its work, should be returned to the panel by Lojewski, Chapin’s selection is a step in the right direction.

His return to the committee under these conditions is an embodiment of one of the themes of his latest book “Grassroots Stewardship: Sustainability within our Reach,” that individuals have the power to make a difference.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy hired former Fairbanks Mayor Jim Matherly to run his Fairbanks office, a position that former Rep. Tammie Wilson had filled during the previous administration. Matherly was defeated by Sen. Scott Kawasaki in his campaign for the Legislature. Matherly starts next week.

Gail Fenumiai, who has done great work for Alaska over the years, ends her career as the head of state elections Friday. She has done a great job in overseeing the transition to ranked choice voting.

It was during the 2010 write-in campaign for Sen. Lisa Murkowski that Fenumiai’s ability to provide level-headed leadership under difficult conditions was evident to most Alaskans.

When the Joe Miller campaign claimed that any voters who misspelled “Murkowski” should have their votes rejected, Fenumiai took the reasonable position that voter intent was what really mattered, based on Alaska history and court precedents.

Murkowski would still have won the election had all the misspelled ballots been rejected, but Miller was desperate.

"If I can pronounce the name by the way it's spelled, that's the standard I'm using," Fenumiai told reporter Sean Cockerham of the Anchorage Daily News.

Miller wanted to cancel the votes of Alaskans who wanted "Merkowski," "Murkowsky," and "Murcowski." His forces also challenged ballots on which Murkowski’s last name was listed first or commas were misplaced.

Fenumiai rejected ballots for the likes of "McCosky," "Misskowski" and "Morcowski,” but Miller and his attorneys said perfection was the only standard.

As I wrote at the time, in most human events, including lawsuits, perfection is a high standard to meet. Impossible, in fact.

In Miller’s lawsuit the following sentence appeared on page 8: "Defendants themselves have argued to both the Alaska Superior Court and Alaska Supreme Court that write-in ballots will be thrown about based on spelling errors or mistakes about candidates’ names."

Thrown about?

It was clear that Miller’s lawyers intended to say ballots “will be thrown out" by the state. But they weren’t held to a standard that required perfection.

Fenumiai’s approach was upheld by the Alaska Supreme Court as the right one, in accord with several rulings over the decades that voter intent is what really counts.

She deserves thanks from Alaskans for putting up with a lot of nonsense over the past few years, most of it created by Trump and his lackeys who continue to spread lies about Alaska elections.

“It was a challenge at times to educate and convince people that maybe the information that they got from the MyPillow Guy isn’t necessarily accurate and you should trust your election folks who actually work here on the frontlines,” Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer said Tuesday, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

The second part of Phil Wight’s account about his electrified drive to Alaska has been published. Read his full story here. Wight and his dad drove from Cincinnati to Fairbanks in a 2019 Chevy Bolt purchased for $22,000. Wight concludes his experiment by saying that a plug-in hybrid is the best option at the moment for Alaskans, but the world is changing fast.

“These vehicles have a battery which permits all electric driving around town (20-50 miles of range), with a petrol engine for longer range trips. As my trip demonstrated, the infrastructure is not yet there to make long-distance electric vehicle travel as easy and convenient as most North Americans expect.”

“That being said, electric vehicles and their related infrastructure are evolving quickly. This year automakers and Alaska’s cleantech accelerator, Launch Alaska, experimented with mobile chargers in a Fairbanks-Arctic Ocean road rally. New mass-market EVs like the Kia EV6 have a range of up to 328 miles and can charge from 10 to 80 percent in as little as 18 minutes. Dozens of nations and automakers, including Ford, General Motors, and Mercedes-Benz, have announced plans to phase-out fossil vehicles. Tens of billions of dollars are being spent across the US and Canada building out ever-faster charging networks. A mass-market EV future may not quite be here yet, but it’s coming quickly, even in the far north.”

Lawyer and author Don Mitchell, who wears his curmudgeon badge like a prize, writes in the Anchorage Daily News that Rep. Mary Peltola’s election was all luck. While it’s true she was lucky, she was also good. Mitchell misses that important part of her election.

It’s not luck that she ran a great campaign. It’s not luck that her opponents failed to reach a larger percentage of the voting public. She was lucky the same way that the late Don Young was lucky in 1972-73, filing for the office at the right time. Contrary to Mitchell’s claims that her appeal to Young voters is a charade, on Alaska issues, Peltola will probably champion most of the issues that Young promoted and will work well with Sen. Lisa Murkowski and perhaps with Sen. Dan Sullivan.

And considering luck, Ted Stevens would not have had the career he did had Sen. Bob Bartlett not died in office on Dec. 11, 1968, clearing the way for Gov. Wally Hickel to appoint him to the Senate.

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