by Andrew Miller
15. July 2009 09:18
In an op-ed article for The Washington Post entitled The 'Cap and Tax' Dead End Sarah Palin reflects on President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan as follows:
"I am deeply concerned about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.”
Palin’s own plans for rescuing the U.S. economy?
"Westerners literally sit on mountains of oil and gas, and every state can consider the possibility of nuclear energy... We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats."
John McCain’s former presidential running-mate’s stance immediately strikes home as yet another profound misinterpretation of regulated carbon markets, employed as a method to harness the power of market forces in the fight against climate change.
Of course, two of our recent books come to mind: Carbon Markets and Voluntary Carbon Markets, which offer well argued, reasoned research on the benefits and opportunities presented by initiatives such as Obama’s cap-and-trade plan.
You can download Nicholas Stern’s foreword from Carbon Markets free from our website here: http://www.earthscan.co.uk/Portals/0/pdfs/Carbon_Markets_Foreword.pdf, which I would suggest is well worth a read if you’re interested by this topic.
As for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Climate Change and Globalization in the Arctic and 2010's Environmental Change and Human Security in the Arctic, to name just two relevant books, provide sobering reading for anyone who might have thought this was a good idea.
