Between Pipeline and Protest - How Trump's New Environmental Policy Is Burning Alaska

It begins with an image straight out of the textbook of fossil power politics: a government plane lands on the Arctic airstrip of Prudhoe Bay. Next to it, the trans-Alaska oil pipeline rises from the ground - a rusting steel artery, a symbol of an America that refuses to learn from the past. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and EPA Chief Lee Zeldin disembark, pose for photos, and smile into the cameras as if they were visiting a national park. In reality, it's the next act of an environmental farce in which President Trump has long taken center stage.

Because what is being sold here under the guise of “sustainable energy policy” is, in truth, an aggressive push to revive every conceivable form of exploitation: oil drilling in protected areas, gas exports through mega-pipelines, logging in fragile ecosystems. The real goal: profit. The means: destruction. The ideology: climate denial and resource nationalism in its purest form.

Outside the conference center in Anchorage, protesters stand with signs that read, “Alaska is not for sale.” But that is exactly what is happening. President Trump, whose second term has been marked by unprecedented deregulation and the systematic dismantling of all environmental protections, is once again trying to turn Alaska into a resource colony. In doing so, voices that call for preservation, foresight, or justice are ignored - or, as in so many other areas of policy, ridiculed.

While the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference discusses fossil expansion inside, people like Sarah Furman and Rochelle Adams stand outside - quiet but resolute. Furman calls Trump’s energy policy a “false solution” - a distraction that does not slow climate change but accelerates it. Rochelle Adams, a member of the Gwich’in, speaks of sacred land, of caribou herds, of survival. Her warning is clear: “When they come to take, we are the ones who will live with the consequences.”

But inside, they applaud. Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, seriously claims that the animals on the North Slope appeared “happy.” Burgum speaks of a peaceful coexistence between drilling rigs and wildlife. And Energy Secretary Wright denounces terms like “renewable energy” as marketing lies. To him, the word “environment” is not a term of protection, but a barrier to economic exploitation.

The Trump administration no longer hides the fact that it is indifferent to climate protection. The planetary collapse is not denied - it is instrumentalized. In their logic, if all energy sources cause harm, then better to use those that bring the most short-term profit. That this cynicism comes at the expense of Indigenous ways of life, global climate goals, and the ecological stability of an entire continent is accepted without hesitation.

At the same time, the Department of Energy is courting delegations from Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates to support a $44 billion liquefied natural gas project. A 1,300-kilometer pipeline is to be built across Alaska - through unstable permafrost, through habitats already under pressure. The government calls it progress. Critics call it what it is: an ecological catastrophe with a diplomatic label.

Trump has never made a secret of the fact that he does not care about the state of nature. His goal is control - over resources, over states, over narratives. In Alaska, this attitude reveals itself in its purest form: the dismantling of protected areas, the reinterpretation of drilling rights as freedoms, the rhetorical disarmament of environmental protection as an “obstacle to American interests.”

But these interests are an illusion. What is celebrated as a triumph in Washington means the loss of land, food, health, and dignity for many in Alaska. The Gwich’in lose their calving grounds, the Iñupiat are divided in their struggle over economic necessity, and wildlife is reduced to PR imagery in a land that was never merely a resource, but always a home.

Alaska is not burning. Not yet. But what is being politically ignited here is a creeping erosion of everything that protects us. The Trump administration has chosen to burn the present rather than secure the future. And while they take selfies in the Arctic expanse, the real question remains unanswered: who will give people back the right to live in a world that was not sold?