The cap-and-trade climate and energy bill passed by the House last month is not a perfect piece of legislation. Critics on the right and left have leveled tough criticisms at it, questioning whether it will do much to accomplish its stated goal of cutting carbon emissions or if it will overburden average consumers with high energy prices.
Palin takes to the pages of The Washington Post to blast away at President Obama’s cap-and-trade plan. Too bad she’s firing away with blanks. Above, Palin on the campaign trail last year.Courtesy sskennel via FlickrThese criticisms, typically, come backed by well-reasoned arguments. The liberal critique of Waxman-Markey focuses on the questionable decision to give away emissions credits to polluters and concerns that the Agriculture Department, not the EPA, will review and regulate carbon offsets in the farming sector. Many conservatives, meanwhile, have argued that the best way to curb emissions and spur a clean-energy revolution is with a carbon tax, not a complicated cap-and-trade scheme.
So when the person John McCain once said knows more about energy policy than anyone else in America pens an op-ed for one of the nation’s highest-regarded newspapers, it’s time to pay attention and learn something.
Sarah Palin, the soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska, has an opinion piece (a screed, really) in Tuesday’s Washington Post in which she shrilly blasts away at “President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan,” calling it “an enormous threat” to the U.S. economy.
Juicy stuff. Ordinarily, we’d let David Roberts out of his cage to respond, but he’s happily away on vacation. Joe Romm will surely be along in the morning with a strong piece tearing apart Palin’s piece. [Yep, here’s his piece.] But for now, here are some first thoughts from me:
Palin’s thesis comes loaded with plenty of rhetoric and zero facts. It offers nothing more than assertions about the emissions reduction part of the bill, ignores the energy investment and green jobs provisions, blames “Washington bureaucrats” for hampering oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (not Congress, where elected lawmakers have repeatedly expressed the American public’s desire to keep ANWR off limits), and fails to even take note of the underlying issue—catastrophic climate change.
Couldn’t Palin’s ghostwriters have cribbed from any of the well-researched, highly technical criticisms produced by just about every conservative think tank in the land?
Grist’s David Roberts and other contributors have answered every one of Palin’s “points” in the past:
Palin says the bill would result in skyrocketing energy prices. Higher prices are surely likely, David noted last month, but not on the order of what Palin thinks.
Palin: “Many states have abundant coal, whose technology is continuously making it into a cleaner energy source.”
See David’s debate with clean-coal flack Joe Lucas. There’s no such thing as clean coal, and even if the technology appears in 10-15 years as predicted, it will be so costly as to effectively raise energy prices substantially on the regular folk Palin claims to be defending.
Palin: “Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy.”
See Kate Sheppard’s piece from last summer. The oil shale pipe dream has been around since the 1970s. The fact is, the technology doesn’t exist yet to extract it cost-effectively, and won’t for many years (if ever). And extraction comes with a host of environmental problems.
As for the nuclear energy canard, the fact remains that most Americans don’t want to live anywhere near a nuclear power plant or a storage facility for highly radioactive nuclear waste. France is a place where bureaucrats truly hold enormous power, and that explains in part why the central government was able to push nuclear so effectively. Thankfully, our American system is more democratic.
Palin: “We have an important choice to make. Do we want to control our energy supply and its environmental impact? Or, do we want to outsource it to China, Russia and Saudi Arabia? Make no mistake: President Obama’s plan will result in the latter.”
Governor, listen closely: oil is a commodity. Even if we increase domestic production, we’ll still be held prisoner to Russia’s and Saudi Arabia’s ability to meet global demand—demand being driven by China, India and many other developing nations.
Ironically, Palin concludes her piece by asking, “Can America produce more of its own energy through strategic investments that protect the environment, revive our economy and secure our nation? Yes, we can.”
Yes, governor, we can accomplish that goal. And there are probably several ways of doing it. But each path requires thoughtful policymaking, not just hot air for hot air’s sake.
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UPDATE: Media Matters now has a quick debunking of Palin’s op-ed. And so does The Atlantic and Huffington Post.
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Comments
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Robert K Posted 9:43 am
14 Jul 2009
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Username Posted 10:29 am
14 Jul 2009
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Russ Walker Posted 10:36 am
14 Jul 2009
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mmooney Posted 11:02 am
14 Jul 2009
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Delay And Deny Posted 12:16 pm
14 Jul 2009
transmission, the development of an efficient and adaptable smart grid,
and the demonstration of technology such as carbon capture and
sequestration, which could prove a cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions than transmitting power from North Dakota to New York City.
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bailsout Posted 2:56 pm
14 Jul 2009
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ecceman Posted 5:14 pm
14 Jul 2009
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AntonioSosa Posted 9:11 pm
14 Jul 2009
Cap and Trade "would be the equivalent of an atomic bomb directed at the U.S. economy—all without any scientific justification," says famed climatologist Dr. S. Fred Singer. It would significantly increase taxes and the cost of energy, forcing many companies to close, thus increasing unemployment, poverty and dependence.
Cap and trade represents huge taxes and cost increases, which will hurt mostly the poor and the middle class while further empowering and enriching Obama and his fraudulent billionaire friends (Gore, Soros, Goldman Sachs, Obama’s Chicago Climate Exchange friends, GE, the United Nations, etc.)-- all at our expense and at the expense of our children and grandchildren.
More than 700 international scientists dissent over man-made global warming claims. They are now more than 13 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers. http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/3562/218/ Additionally, more than 30,000 American scientists have signed onto a petition that states, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." http://www.petitionproject.org Those brainwashed to the point of wanting to destroy the economy to "prevent global warming" are behaving like the most primitive human beings who were duped into believing that human sacrifices would ensure them good weather. Human beings don't have the power to control climate! And killing the economy will not help the environment. Poor countries can't protect the environment. Just look at Haiti! We pray that honest leaders – both Democrat and Republican - are able to save us from Obama's criminal cap-and-trade scam.
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Dave McArthur Posted 2:48 am
15 Jul 2009
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-->There are two quite
separate issues here and they should never ever be confused. This article
commits the fatal error of confusing them. One is our need to
conserve our carbon potential, which includes the carbon balances of the
atmosphere that sustain us. I am sufficiently concerned at our abuse of our
carbon potential that I no longer own cars (I used to have two), I refuse to
fly, I work at a menial job close to home and I no longer buy meat (our family
used to eat 28 lbs a week.) I have thus cut my carbon emissions by maybe 80%
out of sense of civics (stewardship). The second issue is the
need to fight the Cap and Trade push. Cap and Trade is destructive of civics
(stewardship) and is an extremely dangerous scam. If adopted universally it
will lead to an historic wealth flow from the poor to the rich while enabling
the latter to continue polluting and destroying remaining mineral reserves on
scale. It will make global warfare almost inevitable within five years. I recommend, for instance,
the recent Rolling Stone article on Carbon Trading “Inside the Great American
Bubble Machine <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> To quote James Lovelock this week “Most of the ‘green’ stuff
is verging on a gigantic scam," Lovelock told the New Scientist shortly
before the release of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia.
"Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance
and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change,
but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of
reckoning.”… <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> In
kindness Dave McArthur http://www.bonusjoules.co.nz <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->
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