Too many residents, business owners and politicians of Southcentral Alaska — we’re talking the state’s population center of Anchorage, the Mat-Su and Kenai Peninsula — are all agog in anticipation that a multibillion-dollar North Slope natural gas pipeline will save them from unaffordable heating and electric bills.

It’s the time of year for holiday dreams — a warm tradition like Hallmark movies, grandma’s cookies and the Budweiser Clydesdales. But the wintery cold truth about this dream is that there will be no pipeline under the tree — just bits of tinsel left over from premature and misleading celebrations.

The megaproject is too costly and too risky in a world that has plenty of easier and cheaper gas to sell. It has no credible, publicly available construction cost estimate; no long

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