Palin Admits Climate Change, Has No Idea What To Do About It

By Steve Hynd

Thanks to Marc Ambinder for posting the comprehensive takedown of Sarah Palin's ghost-written climate change op-ed in the Washington Post today. Truly, as one of Marc's commenters notes, the only thing to be said in Dubya's favor is that he's smarter than Sarah.

But there's one thing in the ghost-Palin piece that puzzles me. Her admission that climate change is real, even though she doesnt think humanity's runaway environmental pollution is responsible.

I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. I was one of the first governors to create a subcabinet to deal specifically with the issue and to recommend common-sense policies to respond to the coastal erosion, thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice that affect Alaska's communities and infrastructure.

Well, let's assume for a moment that she's right - even if she isn't - and say global warming is definitely happening even if we can't be sure that it has a human root cause. At which point it surely becomes incumbent upon Palin and her hoard of denialist devotees to explain what they might plan to do about a massive shift in climate that will inundate major cities, wipe out a large proportion of the world's most productive farming land, create shifts in weather patterns that will mean both floods and droughts in different parts of the world and create massive dynamic pressures on resources which will fuel wars and insurgencies around the globe.

Palin's answer is a non-answer: "any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs."

Well, let's do that cost/benefit analysis with clear eyes then. How much is all that havoc going to cost? Is there anything we can do to reduce the amount of warming and so ameliorate its effects at a lesser cost? If not, what contingency plans and forward-looking budgets should we be putting in place to ameliorate the symptoms? Is that really going to cost less than trying to reduce climate change's effects before it gets that bad? How far behind the curve on a massive and real threat to national security has Republican denialism left us already? It's already a massive, thorny problem and its going to get worse. Where's the planning?

On all of this, Palin and Co. are silent. Their only idea is that Obama should boycott Copenhagen. Their response might as well be "it'll all be sorted out when we're caught up in the Rapture."