TO: Baby New Year 2012
CC: The aged year 2011
Subject: Progress

Dear Young One,

We love it when your birth approaches. Now is the time many people look back over the previous calendar year, your decrepit forebear, and tally up what went right and wrong. Many resolve to try better next year in specific ways.

We've never been too keen on New Year's resolutions ourselves because they seem like death-bed religious conversions, a bit desperate and belated. After all, if you resolve to start exercising more, to be more generous with your time or money, or to stop shooting heroin, why not do it in April? But if a situation has become that dire (and in many cases it apparently has) we suppose a resolution at the start of a new year is better than none.

Another thing about your arrival is that it wipes the slate clean, gives everyone a fresh start of sorts, if not just a fresh wall calendar. Although we are filled with worry, doubt, confusion and concern most other days of the year, we The Concerned are filled with hope that other people will pick good resolutions, greater than themselves, and then stick to them. It's a thin hope, but sometimes it's all we've got.

As you approach, we hope that federal prosecutors around the U.S. are resolving never to botch a set of cases as badly as the corruption prosecution of the late Sen. Ted Stevens was fudged, according to a Justice Department report. Really, the entire "Polar Pen" probe, of which Stevens's case was a part, turned out to be a big mess, and probably did more to harm to Alaskans' faith in government than it intended to foster.

It'd be great if that didn't happen ever again, but we'll settle for just not in 2012.

And speaking of packaging, it's likely too much for us to hope that reality TV show producers working in Alaska will resolve to lean more toward actual reality -- interesting enough without a story board -- and away from artificial, exploitative snazz. Judging from how things have gone so far, the ideal candidate for an Alaska reality show was at least a decade ahead of his time. Unfortunately for Hollywood, "Papa Pilgrim" died in prison in 2008. But it's not just the fault of TV producers; we hope audiences would resolve to demand the quality they deserve in 2012, but that doesn't seem too likely either.

Speaking of audiences deserving better, while you'll be just starting to walk, Alaska's oil and gas fight will probably be going full tilt. Recently, the rhetoric got a bit too heated when a former House speaker mistakenly said that federal law requires the trans-Alaska pipeline to be dismantled when flow falls below 400,000 barrels per day.

The off-the-cuff comment was retracted, and apparently came from a faulty memory of long-ago discussions, which we think is totally understandable. But we hope that's not an indication of what's to come. We hope everyone involved in the coming tussle over oil, and really any resource fight, resolves to keep accuracy in mind. Alaska depends on wisdom, and wisdom depends on accuracy as well as a long memory.

Unfortunately, accuracy only applies to information that is made available, and a great deal remains unknown about many critical points of the oil tax debate, chief among them just how much immediate jeopardy faces Alaska's main vein, the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Internal documents only made public because of a suit filed by Fairbanks North Star Borough would lead us to believe that we’re not in nearly the trouble the companies would have us believe. But we’ll have to wait to see how the PR machine spins this one.

And we hope that all Alaskans resolve to read everything Dermot Cole writes about this issue.