Palin's First Move

Since announcing her resignation as governor of Alaska in an unexpected and jarring press conference two weeks ago, pundits have been pondering Sarah Palin's next step. Today her strategy is emerging: she intends to be a serious, national conservative voice. In another surprising move, Palin has penned an op-ed in The Washington Post, a paper she'd ordinarily decry as an engine of the liberal media elite. The piece is an attack on what she calls "President Obama's cap-and-tax energy plan." We presume she is referring to the Waxman-Markey bill which recently passed in the House. (Oddly, the White House was conspiciously absent from most of that bill's negotiations, so calling it Obama's plan is a bit of a stretch.) Palin is playing to her strengths. Aside from her social conservatism, energy was the issue where she was perceived to have the most credibility during last year's election.

The op-ed contains none of her trademark folksiness. This is not Sarah the Hockey Mom. It is a serious piece that tries to position her as an authority on the subject ("Those who understand the issue ..."), invokes the preferred GOP language ("cap-and-tax" rather than "cap-and-trade"), and points to her success ("In Alaska, we are progressing on the largest private-sector energy project in history.") Admittedly she uses an exclamation point ("But the answer doesn't lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!"), but that is the only visible sign of the jittery, idiosyncratic Palin present at her recent press conference. The Palin evident in this op-ed is an America-first conservative; a supply-sider who's worried about costs and jobs. This is perhaps the first step in her reinvention as a politician of national stature, despite not having an elected pulpit to preach from. It's the Mitt Romney model.

Unfortunately for Palin, it doesn't look like she's read the bill or talked to the numerous industry representatives who support it. After reading Palin's op-ed, you'd be forgiven for believing that the nation's coal plants will be shut tomorrow, nuclear power and natural gas will be outlawed, and that carbon allowances will be costly in the first instance. None of this is true. Under Waxman-Markey, coal will remain a critical part of America's energy equation for decades, although coal burning utilities will be encouraged to invest in cleaner technologies. There are targets for renewable sources of energy, but their implementation is a long way off. So far in fact, that many environmentalists are aggravated, but the costs of integrating renewables into the grid will be spread out over time. A vast number of carbon allowances will be handed out for free initially, with costs ramping up over time, thus smoothing the impact of cap-and-trade on consumers. Nuclear will become a more attractive option over the longer term as the price on carbon increases, but the ramp is so slow that utilities will have ample time to invest in plant construction─again, so there isn't a price shock. There's simply no evidence to suggest that natural-gas demand will decline. Energy utilities will still need baseload power to service customers 24/7 (something wind and solar generators are still working on─their production is more variable). Natural gas has a smaller carbon footprint than coal, so its appeal to utilities will likely increase. 

But does the reality of Waxman-Markey matter? Not really. Palin isn't trying to convince fence-sitters that cap-and-trade is a bad idea. And she won't persuade anyone who supports it that she's right. She's speaking to conservatives who, already suspicious of environmentalists messing with how they live, are looking for an national advocate. And, most importantly, she's signalling to the Beltway that she expects to be taken seriously. But if that is going to happen, she may want to do her homework more thoroughly.