Living the American Green

Sarah Palin: a Truth within a (fairly important) lie

During the campaign in 2008, a lot of people said a lot of things.  I remember the night that we were all introduced to Sarah Palin, at the same event that brought us Micheal Steele and Drill Baby Drill, and I remember being very impressed with the way Palin delivered.  She was strong, aggressive, and completely willing to roll up here sleeves and attack.  And she sounded like she was an expert in the one issue that the democrats have dominated in for years: Energy Efficiency.  She talked (at least vaguely knowledgeably) about energy independence, about oil and natural gas, and about the need (once the Drill Baby Drill chants had subsided) of looking at alternative forms of energy to go along with destroying some more Alaskan Wildlife.  Then, she said this, about her own roll in Alaska Energy markets:

“… and we began a nearly $40 billion natural-gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.”

Well, according to Conde Nast, she has since been found to be lying.  Or, if not lying outright, taking some big liberties with the word “Began”.

In fact, she got together a lot of money to start looking to see if a Natural Gas line was feasible.  So get this: apparently, Alaska is cold and unforgiving.  Wild, right?  As a result, it is hard and expensive to build a major pipeline from the Natural Gas to the Civilization, and everyone needs to be on board for a long, arduous and expensive building process to get to the promised land.  Also, everyone needs to hope real hard that Natural Gas is still worth the investment… oh, 20 years down the line when this pipeline thing starts to turn a real profit.  (not my numbers, BTW.  Cribbed, loosely, from the Conde Nast article).

Generally, this has always been my concern with the whole Drill here and Drill now mentality.  Because of the time it takes to get infrastructure set up, oil or gas out of the ground, and then oil and gas into the market, not only are you wringing the last little bits out of obsolete fossil fuels, but your also taking a huuuge risk that the entire process will still be cost effective way down the line.

Specifically, Sarah Palin totally exaggerated how far along the project was, and what her role in it had been.  She didn’t get a pipeline started… in fact her platform made the project much less likely to ever get off the ground.

Sarah Palin in 2012: Does she know energy?

It’s interesting:  One of her claims — that she was standing up to the big oil industry — is apparently quite true.  She did stand up to them, hoping that the future of Alaska would be Natural Gas and would be free from the clutches of Exxon, BP and co.  However, she either failed to account for, or willfully ignored, the fact that those same companies had the controlling interest in the new natural resource that she hoped would lead Alaska forward.  So shunting them to the side means that there is almost no chance that any Gas goes through the pipeline, because the big companies wont play ball.

Barack Obama wants the pipeline. It says so right on the White House website, in the section about energy and the environment: prioritize the construction of the alaska natural gas pipeline. But Obama might not realize that one of the biggest obstacles in its path—all Palin’s rhetoric notwithstanding—is the woman who wants to take the presidency from him in 2012, Governor Sarah “Drill, Baby, Drill” Palin.

As Mike Hawker, the Republican co-chairman of Alaska’s House Finance Committee, told me one night in Juneau not long ago, “The only thing standing in the way of an Alaska gas pipeline is the Sarah Palin administration.”

To her credit, Palin really did see herself as the person to free Alaska from the clutches of a pretty nasty set of capitalist overlords, but she seems to have failed to anticipate the realities of who is control of what up there.   Further, she ruffled enough feathers that the entire project is a pipeline without a product, meaning that there is no way the actual plan goes forward with Palin in office.

Which, in turn, makes it increasingly less likely that the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge will ever have a giant tube plopped down on it, or have natural gas pumped out of it.  Sarah the accidental environmentalist?

Where, exactly, does she get off claiming that this whole thing was a $40 Billion project that would revitilize Alaska, and lead America to energy independence?  Pretty off claim, considering what has actually gotten built, eh?  More from Joe McGinniss’ article:

Indeed, she seems to have a remarkable capacity for hearing only what she wants to hear. She may not be “a fucking psychopath,” as one very prominent Alaskan told me she was, but Palin does seem prone to what psychologists call magical thinking. At its most basic level, this is a tendency to believe that you exert more control over events than you actually do. It is the irrational belief that thinking is the same as doing, that you can actually cause a circumstance or an event to occur simply by wishing for it. It is common and natural in young children. Believing that you will become president of the United States someday simply because you want to would be an example of magical thinking. Another example would be believing that you can make a gas line happen, if only you want it badly enough and—as Palin has done—you ask schoolchildren to pray for it. Believing that as governor of Alaska you can bend Exxon Mobil to your will is magical thinking in the extreme.

So, sure, I could rage and/or whine about the fact that she totally misled America about her connection to that energy thing, but what with the Bridge to Nowhere dust up and the fact that her “military experience” was limited to keeping an eye on Putin’s rearing head, I think she’s taken enough Liar Licks recently.  What interests me is more how intractable and complete the grip the oil/energy companies have over Alaska as a whole.  The article certainly makes it seem intractable.

What with news of Bristol and Levi separating, and of Palin’s mounting legal fees, perhaps things returning to some sort of Karmic balance up there in the frozen north.

Who wrote this one?  TheAmericanGreen - The founding member of the American Green institute, and a New York based producer and writer hoping to make the jump from "freelancer" to "documentary producer". Read more from this author