Here’s what I took away from (soon-to-be-former) Governor Sarah Palin’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post Tuesday:

1. Sarah Palin doesn’t acknowledge climate change. But if she did…
2. Sarah Palin doesn’t believe humans contribute to climate change.
3. Sarah Palin doesn’t understand Cap and Trade, but…
4. Sarah Palin sure can spew talking points!

Treehugger posted a devastating and highly entertaining takedown of Sarah (”Failin’ and Bailin’”) Palin this morning that we had to share with our readers. Take a look.

Golly. Mrs. Palin has a couple problems with the cap and trade plans, dontcha know. Seems it’ll be awful expensive, and a little risky–and why bother when there’s a big natural gas pipeline we can build, and this Arctic National Wilderness Refuge that’s got a whole lot of oil we can use? Plus, coal’s getting a whole lot cleaner these days, so we should just burn more of that, too–otherwise, everybody’s going to lose their jobs. See, we just need to drill more, get more gas and oil from the US of A, and keep on keeping on with coal–and presto. Energy problems solved.

That is, unfortunately, evidently Sarah Palin’s vision for the future of America’s energy economy, as explained in her op-ed in the Washington Post today. She should have stuck to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’

Sarah Palin’s Anti-Cap and Trade Op Ed
At least that seemed to get people excited. In her two-page piece attacking what she calls “Obama’s” cap and trade (strange, it was authored by Representatives Waxman and Markey), she breaks out all the usual talking points commonly levelled against cap and trade while offering precisely no alternatives to acheiving the climate bill’s goals.

In fact, it seems like she either doesn’t understand the primary purpose of the bill–which is of course to begin curbing carbon emissions to fight climate change–or she just wanted an excuse to talk up her natural gas pipeline. You know, the one that may never actually get built.

To help you get an idea of the focus of Palin’s article, I tallied up some of the key terms that tend to surface in articles about the climate bill:

Number of Times Each Term Used
Climate Change: 0
Global Warming: 0
‘Renewable,’ ‘Alternative,’ or ‘Clean Energy’: 0
Cap-and-Tax: 5

Palin literally never addresses climate change at all in her piece–not a single mention. And she doesn’t discuss renewable energy either–she essentially says ‘America has a lot of natural resources, and we should continue to use them.’ That’s it. That’s the extent of her vision. For good measure, she repeatedly terms the climate bill a ‘cap-and-tax’ in a persistent effort to get the term to stick with the American public.

Read the whole article here.

Related Articles:

• Who’s Getting Rich Off Cap and Trade?
• Peter Barnes: The Atmosphere Is a Commons
• Waxman-Markey, Cap-and-Dividend, and Real Climate Solutions

Image: J.delanoy. Original uploader was Ann arbor street at en.wikipedia.org. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

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