The Alaska Senate race is a test this year of whether one of America’s last intact wildernesses will be sacrificed for short-term drilling profits. It is also a toss-up, which is remarkable given how badly the fossil-fuel lobby needs Mary Peltola to lose. They have spent two cycles trying to sell Arctic drilling as Alaska’s only path forward, and every time the receipts come in, the receipts say otherwise. Sen. Dan Sullivan is betting his career on tearing the refuge open. Democrats in Washington have rightly stood in the way — and they did so again before they left town last month, blocking a bill that would have locked in oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In 2017 Congress required the Interior Secretary to create a plan for developing oil and gas in the ANWR coastal plain with a competitive program for leasing, developing and transporting the resources. The Biden Administration suspended the leases in 2021 pending environmental review, and Joe Biden’s Interior Secretary later canceled the leases — a principled pause that gave scientists, Alaska Natives, and tribal communities the breathing room to weigh in on what should never have been opened in the first place. The course corrections exposed what the boosters never wanted to admit: oil and gas development on the coastal plain was never going to deliver the bonanza they promised, and the policy swings every few election cycles meant no serious operator could responsibly commit the capital a real project would require.
That judgment was confirmed by the Trump Administration’s own June sale. The Bureau of Land Management offered some 689,000 acres for lease and received bids on only about 70,000 acres, worth about $3.7 million. The market spoke. The market said not here, not now, not at these terms. The market said the Arctic’s value as intact wilderness outlasts the value of whatever is underneath it.
Enter Sullivan, whose “Alaska’s Right to Produce Act 2.0” would have stripped any future Democratic administration’s power to cancel coastal-plain leases — locking in extraction against future presidents, future climates, and future indigenous generations. It was a power grab dressed up as a property right. His fix for a project the private sector had already declined to fund was a federal guarantee that no future Cabinet secretary could ever revoke a permit. That is not a jobs plan. That is corporate welfare on permafrost.
Democrats and their climate allies blocked it from getting a vote on the Senate floor. Defenders of Wildlife warned the bill would unleash “rampant oil and gas drilling,” while Sen. Martin Heinrich (D., N.M.) called it “another bill that would prioritize oil and gas over literally everything else.” Heinrich’s critique was not hypocrisy. It was precision. The charge that a senator from a producing state has no standing to oppose drilling inverts the record. The same U.S. Energy Information Administration that tracks Alaska’s output reports New Mexico had 4.15 trillion cubic feet of gross natural gas withdrawals in 2025 — production that occurs under a regulatory framework with stronger environmental standards and meaningful tribal consultation than anything Sullivan proposes for the Arctic coastal plain. New Mexico drills where drilling is regulated and consultative; Sullivan proposes to drill where neither applies. Two different states, two different ecosystems, two different obligations. New Mexico’s regulatory record is an indictment of Sullivan’s approach, not a vindication of it.
Opponents of the Sullivan bill are right that oil and gas leases in ANWR would destroy wildlife habitats, spoil the wilderness, and infringe on sacred indigenous lands — and the “small fraction” defense is a dodge. If all of the 2026 leases offered had been purchased, the less than 700,000 acres would still have been a small fraction of the more than 19 million acre wildlife refuge. But the coastal plain is the part that cannot be replaced.
The oil industry does make up a significant portion of Alaska’s GDP — a dependence that, however real, is the very reason the state needs to diversify before the world’s energy transition strands it. Booster talking points pretend the 2026 lease offerings would have been the economic spine of the state. They would not. The boosters call future leases jobs and tax revenue; what they deliver is the foreclosing of the longer-term economic base in tourism that an intact refuge makes possible. Fishing, tourism, subsistence, the military footprint, and the renewable resource base Alaska is only beginning to inventory together employ more Alaskans and generate more durable revenue than any coastal-plain lease ever will. Progressives are not trying to reduce Alaska to a postcard for cruise ships and dog-sled races. They are trying to keep Alaska from being reduced to one. The oil patch cannot carry a state of this size, and the leases that did sell under Trump II will not change that arithmetic.
And the appeal to America’s energy needs and national-security interests obscures the deeper security question: a destabilized Arctic — one whose Indigenous communities have been steamrolled, whose permafrost is already destabilizing — is a national-security liability, not an asset. Across his two terms, Sen. Sullivan has presented himself as Alaska’s indispensable champion, championing an extraction-at-any-cost agenda for a state whose people deserve better stewardship of their land and wildlife. His record of attempted federal backstops for uneconomic drilling suggests he is the champion of one industry, in one corner of the state, at one moment in the energy transition.
His opponent, Mary Peltola, did something this year that should make every Alaskan voter pay attention. She co-sponsored an earlier version of this legislation in the House, then voted “present” on the floor. That is not fence-sitting. That is the vote of someone who took the underlying problem seriously, took the committee work seriously, and judged the bill as written to be a single-industry future Alaska did not ask for — a quiet act of conscience from a representative who had listened to her constituents and to indigenous communities.
Peltola could deliver the 51st vote to give Democrats a majority, and her presence in the chamber would help keep Alaska’s vast energy resources — and its irreplaceable wilderness — out of Sullivan’s drill rigs. Sullivan needs every voter to believe that voting against her is voting for Alaska. It is the opposite. Voting for Peltola is voting for an Alaska that gets to choose what it becomes, instead of one locked into what it was.
