The Truly Scary Thing About Palin

Ever since the surprise nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCaine's running mate the press has been filled with stories relating to her lack of experience, her position on abortion and even absurdly irrelevant discussions of her pregnant teenage daughter. All of this has served to distract the public from what may be the strongest problem with Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate, her badly misguided positions on energy policy. Recently CNBC did an extensive interview with Sarah Palin including a frank discussion of her positions on energy policy. We reviewed this interview as well as numerous presentations by Palin on the topic of energy and renewable energy and frankly found it shocking, though not necessarily surprising. After all she is the Governor of Alaska and Alaska gets 80% of its oil revenues from oil and natural gas companies. Nonetheless, in this CNBC interview, had we not known we were listening to the governor of Alaska, we would have guessed that we were listening to a highly paid lobbyist for the big oil companies. She is that pro big oil!

Palin has long been a strong advocate for drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). When asked about her position on this she said "We need to drill, drill, drill." She has even suggested that she thinks she can persuade John McCaine to approve drilling in the Refuge even though this was one of the rare areas where McCaine disagreed with Bush. She is a big promoter of off-shore drilling and seems to discount any impact the drilling would have on the environment. When the interviewer asked her what the environmental consequences of all this drilling would be she discounted the problem by bascially dissing the environmentalists. She said that the environmentalists were wrong when they said the Alaskan oil pipeline might hurt the caribou herds. She said the herds were fine and therefore drilling in the Arctic Refuge would not have any negative impact. This was a scarily simplistic answer to an important but complex problem, something we have seen all too often from the Republican candidates. Many scientists believe that the oil pipeline did, in fact, impact the caribou herds significantly and that drilling in the arctic would cause even more damage to wildlife because of the nature of the terrain. For an excellent discussion of this see this article from the San Francisco Chronicle appropriately titled "The Last Refuge".

The interviews with Palin are worrisome not only for their content, but for the overall attitude they convey. Palin is not only pro oil, she appears anti-renewable energy. In the interview she acknowledge that her state had vast resources of renewable energy such as wind and tidal energy, and then in the same breath says ""These renewables are not proven to be economic or reliable". Not reliable! Tell that to the millions of people around the world that get their energy from solar, water and wind energy. Not economic! Tell that to the smart people in the energy industry like T. Boone Pickens who are making a nice little fortune creating and selling renewable energy.

Its not only what Palin says that is disturbing it is what she doesn't say. It appears that the term "Global Warming" is not even in her vocabulary. She says "Drill, drill, drill" but she might as well say "Warm, warm, warm" because the inevitable consequence of drilling for more oil is putting more carbon into the atmosphere. Palin was once asked about global warming, she told the conservative Newsmax.com that, while it would affect Alaska more than any other state, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." How out of touch can you be!

We strongly urge our readers to take a look at this recent interview with Palin and hear first hand her comments on energy policy. You can find the interview on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GE11URmmnc.