At a time when conversations about energy are often shaped far from the places that produce it, it’s worth pausing to recognize a voice that carries both credibility and lived experience. Born and raised in Anchorage, Drake Ward brings something increasingly rare to the national dialogue: firsthand understanding of the people, infrastructure, and industries that power not just Alaska, but much of the nation.
His perspective isn’t theoretical—it’s grounded in a childhood shaped by the realities of Alaska’s resource economy, where energy production isn’t an abstract concept but a daily livelihood. In his recent opinion piece, Ward articulates a growing disconnect between energy consumption and energy understanding, particularly among younger generations. But more importantly, he does so with a clarity and authenticity that reflects Alaska’s unique role in the conversation.
Alaska should take pride in voices like Ward’s—thoughtful, informed, and willing to engage in complex debates without losing sight of the real people behind the policies. At a moment when energy literacy matters more than ever, his words serve as both a reminder and a call to action: that Alaska’s story is best told by those who have lived it.
Opinion: How Gen Z’s energy literacy crisis is costing Alaska
Drake Ward, Anchorage Daily News, April 29th, 2026
Growing up in Anchorage, I never had to think twice about where energy came from. The people around me worked to provide it — winters on the Slope, on the pipeline, in the support industries that keep extraction running. Energy was never abstract; it was someone’s job, someone’s livelihood, the backbone of the state’s economy that guided the everyday lives of thousands.
Then I left for university out of state, and I started hearing things that genuinely stopped me mid conversation.
A professor described drilling in the Arctic as destructive and “uniquely evil.” A university administrator, when I mentioned I wanted to work in Alaska resource development law, immediately began preaching about the dangers of resource development, assuming I wanted Alaska to remain a snow globe for the rest of the country to look upon and smile at: beautiful, fragile and untouched.
This is the energy literacy crisis of my generation. It is costing real people real things.
My peers and I are the most energy-consuming generation in history. We stream constantly, charge devices that never leave our hands and have transitioned to a more online world. Yet we also register the highest opposition to offshore oil and gas drilling of any demographic group in modern polling. This isn’t hypocritical; it’s what happens when a generation grows up never asking where power comes from.
When my classmates plug in their laptops, they aren’t questioning what made that simple action possible. They aren’t thinking about the natural gas plant that generated the electricity, or about the pipeline that delivered the fuel, or about the federal permitting process that took years to approve. To them, electricity comes from the wall. The physical infrastructure that converts raw resources into usable energy is invisible to the people consuming it most, and in a democracy, the people who don’t think about how something works still get to vote on whether it continues.
Alaska is where that abstraction has the sharpest consequences. Oil and gas revenues have made up considerable portions of Alaska’s budget for decades. The men and women I grew up around worked long days in difficult conditions in one of the harshest environments on Earth. When someone who has never been to Alaska decides it should be preserved like a decorative object on the mantle, they are making a fiscal and economic argument on behalf of people they have never met, with consequences they will never experience.