Former Alaska governor and GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin writes, in "Copenhagen's political science" on the op-ed page of today's The Washington Post:With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.
Much as I hate to admit it, she makes a valid point in her op-ed: the recent publication of embarrassing e-mails filched from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain is a game changer. This so-called "climate-gate" scandal undermines my own personal confidence in scientific projections about imminent global warming. It should undermine President Obama's as well, I think — unfortunately, just as the Copenhagen conference on climate change opens.
Let me be clear: even if global warming is a figment, I believe we should still transition to renewable energy sources as fast as possible. But the reason we ought to do so is that we need to develop sources of energy that (eventually) will be abundant and ultra-cheap to harvest: solar, wind, geothermal, and the like. With those resources fully in play — the technological hurdles of harvesting them having been overcome — America will have energy running out of its ears.
Our economy runs on energy, right? When clean electrons become cheap enough to replace dirty electrons that derive from coal, oil, gas, etc., we'll have the basis for hugely enlarged economic productivity. Everyone in America will benefit — once the industries that produce all the dirty electrons finally wither and die.
Ms. Palin misses that point: there are other compelling reasons, besides climate change, to go green, energy-wise.
Still and all, the debate has been framed otherwise. Efforts to reduce the greenhouse emissions of this country and others have been justified as prudential reactions to the threat of global warming. If that threat has been exaggerated by scientists' misfeasance — and it looks like it has — where does that leave us?
If key scientists have interfered with the customary avenues of peer review — and it looks like they have — doesn't that raise legitimate doubts about today's orthodoxy concerning imminent climate change?
I think it does.
