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Some heavily taxed European nation or a time in the future when fossil fuels have grown dangerously sparse?
No. Try right now in the most remote villages of America’s 49th state.
High oil prices that swelled Alaska’s treasury have come back to slam the state, particularly its 170 rural villages.
Gov. Sarah Palin has proposed checks of $1,200 for each resident to help relieve some of the burden using a surplus from the oil-rich state treasury.
But in far-flung villages, the people expect things to get much worse. The seasonal barge shipments of fuel have yet to arrive, meaning villages are still paying last year’s prices, already a minimum of 60 cents higher than the U.S. average.
Here in Barrow, residents pay $4.65 for a gallon of gas. When the barges come, that price tag will be closer to $7.
“I’m tired of everyone else harping on $4 a gallon for gas,” said Barrow resident Marvin Olson. “We’ve been paying that for four years when everybody else was paying $2 a gallon.”
High costs aren’t new for many of these villages, but the situation is becoming dire, and some residents are fleeing for larger areas.
There are more homes abandoned ahead of winter when minus 50 will be considered a nice day. Villages must figure out how to pay for enough fuel to make it to summer.
The season’s first snow in some areas is barely two months away.
Alaskans in rural areas will spend 40 percent of their annual income on energy this winter compared with 4 percent for the average Alaska household, according to a University of Alaska Anchorage study published in May.
Access to fuel in Alaska can be a matter of survival.
Boats and four-wheelers are used not for sport, but to hunt.
The Inupiaq whaling community of 4,000 residents relies on the land and sea to survive.
There are ceremonies in the center of town to celebrate a successful hunt for bowhead whale. At a grocery store two blocks from where the ceremonies are held, a loaf of bread goes for $6; a gallon of milk, $10; a dozen eggs, $4.60; a pound of strawberries, $10; a half-pound of lunch meat, $7.
Barrow is better off than many Alaskan villages. The community gets subsidized natural gas from nearby fields. It has benefited from oil field property taxes that have helped build schools and municipal buildings.
Word of hardships in other isolated villages is slowly making its way to Barrow.
People shell out $10 a gallon for unleaded fuel in Anaktuvuk Pass; those from the state’s southern coastal region pay $9.10 for heating fuel in Kokhanok; and electricity costs $1.17 a kilowatt hour in Western Alaska’s Lime Village.
The wait for Barrow’s next fuel barge shipment in about a month, usually a time of relief, is now a source of growing angst, knowing gas for the next year could be in the $7 to $8 a gallon range.
Said Barrow whaling captain Jacob Adams: “We could be going back to dog teams if we can’t afford the cost of gas for subsistence hunting.”
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