SEATTLE — For many Alaskans, Monday was "a huge disappointment, a really big disappointment," as Gov. Bill Walker put it, reflecting on the tax revenue, jobs and investments that may be lost as Royal Dutch Shell abandons its plan to drill for oil in the Alaskan Arctic.
But for many people here in Washington State and elsewhere, it was a day of exuberance, one that offered evidence that the harbor blockades, city resolutions, lawsuits and relentless cries of "Shell No!" had helped force Shell's hand.
"This is testament to the fact that when people come together they have power to move mountains," said John Sellers, a local climate activist who organized a "mosquito fleet" of kayakers who trained together and then surged out into Puget Sound over the summer to fight Shell.
The economies and cultures of Alaska and Washington have long been intertwined and dependent. Many Alaskan fishing fleets today are based in Seattle and pay their wages here; in decades past, gold miners disembarked from Puget Sound for the gold fields of Alaska and Canada. The result is a kind of mutual orbit with each side circling the other, in mutual benefit or frustration. On Monday, the glaring differences were everywhere.
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In Alaska, Shell's announcement that it would suspend drilling in the Chukchi Sea after a test well showed less promise than hoped for was one more blow to a state where energy-tax revenues — which pay for most of the budget — are drying up as prices and production have fallen. More than half of the state's $ 5.2 billion this year could not be collected, forcing budget cuts and a deep dive into a state savings account. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline that made the state rich after its completion in the 1970s is pumping only a quarter of its oil capacity.
"It's tough times," said Kara Moriarty, the president of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, who said that rumors of layoffs in the next few weeks or months, in both the corporate offices of oil companies in Anchorage and in the drilling fields, were flying everywhere. "It's an incredibly sobering day," she added.
Economists in Alaska said that questions of psychology and morale were now crucial: If Shell was bailing out, they said, other companies might get cold feet as well in investing or hiring or exploring. Political pressure would also intensify, they said, particularly in advance of a special session of the Legislature called for next month to consider state investment in a natural gas pipeline.
"This will probably not help all the people who have been saying it's the decade of the Arctic," said Gunnar Knapp, director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska. Dr. Knapp, a professor of economics, said that about $ 7 billion remains in a savings account set up by the Legislature for emergencies, but that the state is going through the fund at the rate of about $ 3 billion a year. "This is what is causing a political crisis," he said.
Seattle's mayor, Ed Murray, a Democrat, said the future looked very different — and hopeful — to him.
"The people of Seattle stood up to oppose the use of our city as a base for expanded Arctic drilling," he said in a statement. "With today's announcement, it is time to move forward."
Political leaders in Seattle — including a City Council member, Mike O'Brien — who joined the so-called kayaktivists in facing down Shell, said that the tactics honed and used here to defeat the company had already become a template for climate activists elsewhere. Tiny-boat flotillas for climate protest are being planned or have already occurred in the Seine River in Paris and waterways in Switzerland and Southern California. The premise of this new approach, they said, is that since the effects of climate change are global, climate-protection battlefields are everywhere as well.
"The world we're heading into is very different from the world we're coming out of," Mr. O'Brien said, "and cities like Seattle are not open to doing business with folks like Shell if their business model is extracting oil from the Arctic."
Shell said that a failure to find enough oil in its test well, along with federal regulatory uncertainty, prompted its decision, not protests or attacks on its public image. But leaders of environmental groups said they believed the tactical decision made earlier this year — to wage the fight against Arctic drilling here in Seattle, where there is little oil but lots of environmental passion — had made a big impact in focusing the nation's attention.
"The problem was never directly about Shell coming to Seattle, it was a problem with them leaving and going to the Arctic," said Emily Johnston, one of the kayak flotilla organizers. She said there was no way of knowing what influence, if any, the protests had on Shell's decision, but she and other demonstrators said they felt certain that their work had succeeded in keeping pressure on local elected officials and the Obama administration. That pressure, they said, helped foster the regulatory uncertainty that Shell found untenable.
A spokesman for Shell, Curtis Smith, said in an email that it was too early to say what presence the company might want to maintain in Seattle's port, but suggested that there might not be much.
"Our staging needs in the Pacific Northwest will be commensurate with the amount of activity we have planned for future Arctic exploration," he said.
Mr. Walker, Alaska's governor, said in an interview that any benefit from Shell's program was years in the future at best. But in the short term, he said, he feared ripple effects on the many subcontractors supplying Shell with goods or services. About 600 to 800 people were also working directly for Shell in Alaska at any given time in rotating shifts, according to the oil and gas association. Alaska's unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in August, just slightly higher than the national rate of 5.2 percent.
"It will have an impact on companies, no question about it," said Mr. Walker, a former Republican who was elected last year as an independent.
What happens next is also likely to become a battlefield. Climate protesters here said that with Shell now out of the way, the momentum and pressure would continue on the Obama administration to close the door on any further Arctic drilling.
"We want to put him in a moral dilemma for the rest of his presidency," said Mr. Sellers, the Seattle protester.
Mr. Walker said he would fight harder than ever to get more oil drilling permitted, especially in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the Obama administration partly shut down to exploration earlier this year.
"We need to get some oil in the pipeline, and we need to get it as quickly as possible," Mr. Walker said.
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