The Alaska Congressional delegation came home from the nation's capital to say goodbye to Alaska icon and former Gov. Wally Hickel, and took the opportunity Monday to tell the Alaska Chamber of Commerce what most everyone there wanted to hear:

Offshore oil development needs to move forward in the north despite the ongoing, oil-spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Alaskans know how to do oil development in the environmentally correct way (even if those Outside don't). And the only thing standing between Alaska and an energy-rich future is the boot of the federal bureaucracy on the throat of the last frontier.

Rep. Don Young, the Republican congressman for all Alaska almost forever, got the day's applause as he belittled Congress as "probably the worst place you can go to get facts," attacked federal bureaucrats as frighteningly powerful, and lionized Hickel for his long and tireless advocacy for state's rights, most particularly the 49th state's rights.

"This is Wally Hickel's day," Young said. "We're saying goodbye, but his legacy will live with us."

Everybody at the head table tried to grab a piece of that legacy. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, criticized the Department of the Interior for spending money studying wilderness classification for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at a time when the agency claimed to lack the money necessary to finalize surveys necessary before turning over to Alaska lands promised 50 years ago.

"There are millions of acres of land this state is owed since statehood," Begich said. The state would like those lands in ANWR if it could get them, but it can't. Unable to do that, it wants to make sure ANWR isn't declared wilderness, which could forever block access to what is thought to be millions of barrels of crude beneath the ground.

That the federal government would be in charge of such important decision for the future of Alaska seemed hard to take for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. The state's senior senator jabbed at big government back in Washington, D.C. for imposing health care, backing deficit-boosting stimulus plans, and considering potentially onerous regulations aimed at stopping climate change.

"We were going to be impacted in this state by the EPA," she warned. "Their regulations are coming at you."

The Environmental Protection Agency is under orders from the U.S. Supreme Court to regulate greenhouse gases as a planet-warming pollutant. Murkowski wants Congress to override that order as do Young and Begich, although the latter volunteered that he had a different approach to the issue than Murkowkski. She wants Congress to simply declare that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Begich said he isn't ready to do that yet.

"Right now," he said, "I want to keep the pressure on this legislative body" to deal with CO2 as part of a national energy policy.

Strangely enough, though, neither Begich, Murkowski nor Young mentioned what might be a cornerstone in a new American energy policy -- clean, efficient, readily available, low-C02-emitting Alaska natural gas. Young said later he didn't bring it up because a much-discussed and long-awaited Alaska gas line isn't going to get built despite the nearly two-year-old claims of half-term former Gov. Sarah Palin that construction had begun. Natural gas prices, Young said, are too low to justify the expense of construction.

No one brought up how those prices might be changed by Congressional action to make natural gas or other forms of clean American energy -- wind, solar, even tidal -- economically viable, although Young did hint at one of the obvious ways.

"I'd like to see, very frankly, a tax on imported oil," he said. Young has suggested this before, along with an increase on the federal tax on gasoline. The congressman possibly most despised by outraged environmentalists now flocking to the Gulf of Mexico spill aboard fuel-sucking jet airliners has never found any traction on the issue.

As all the Alaska representatives noted in some form or another, there does seem to be a bit of disconnect on the part of Americans between the energy they use and where that energy comes from. Young, who has sometimes been unfairly criticized as a dummy, at least understands the origin of the jet fuel and gasoline coursing through American's transportation lifelines.