Sarah Palin has a new job

When Sarah Palin recently announced her pending resignation as governor of Alaska part way through her first term, we wondered where we'd see her next. A clue came from an op-ed piece she recently wrote for the Washington Post (no link, look it up), where she argued vigorously against the current Waxman-Markley cap-and-trade proposal wending its way through Congress. Perhaps she's lining up a career as a pundit or lobbyist?

Painful as it is to say it, although I disagree with almost everything in her piece, I do concur with her overall conclusion the bill is a bad idea. Here are some of my observations about her writing:

1. Her first purpose seems to be to conflate energy with oil. It appears she'd even prefer to make that Alaskan crude but is forced to concede later down that coal and nuclear power are acceptable alternatives. She omits any mention of renewable sources of energy; apparently we can't power our economy with those.
2. She uses a provision of the bill, which offers funding to retrain displaced workers, to argue that the bill will have an overall negative effect on employment. However, retraining workers to land new jobs is a responsible response to a shift in energy production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Is the better alternative to leave the displaced employees out in the cold? I guess she's not one of those compassionate conservatives.
3. If electricity prices do go up as a result of this bill, that implies the current bill is the wrong approach, not that cap-and-trade in general is a bad idea. As far as I can tell, one fatal flaw in the current bill is the giveaway of a huge amount of emissions credits to polluters - a provision offered to them precisely to avoid price hikes in the consumer sector. If producers are going to spike prices even with free emissions credits, then Congress should consider going back to candidate Obama's original proposal, which was to strictly auction off all the credits and use the auction proceeds as a per-capita refund. That's not a perfect solution either but at least it mitigates the claim that "with cap-and-trade your bills will go up".

4. Palin throws in a reference to outsourcing our energy decisions to China and Russia without apparently developing the idea further in that piece. I wonder if that meme has propagated enough yet for her to just mention it to make sense.

   What she's referring to is the very real effect the current bill may have on the domestic/import mix of oil. Basically, if energy refining is more expensive here (because of emissions controls and costs) then refiners will shut down plants and import more finished goods; according to Bloomberg, they're already making this threat. It seems from the Congressional testimony of Joost Pauwelyn (a good read, and thanks to Paul Krugman for the reference) that the WTO would be fine with Congress responding by imposing an equalizing tariff at the border on imports from countries which don't impose the same taxes we do on carbon processing; however, the Obama administration has ruled that out for some reason, leading to this perverse potential effect and leaving the bill's authors open to the assertion that we'd be end up more dependent on foreign oil (in the short term, we hope) not less.