For decades, Alaska’s economy has depended on the harvest of natural resources — industries like pumping oil out of the ground and cutting timber.

Now, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy wants the state to make money by leaving trees standing, and by pumping carbon emissions back into the ground.

Investment is currently flooding into those kinds of projects, driven by the increasing urgency to slow global warming by cutting human-caused carbon emissions.

Dunleavy has long rejected the scientific consensus that those emissions are causing climate change, and in his first interview detailing his mone...