Just as she had lots to say on Face about health care reform (remember the "death panels?"), former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is now all over BP's oil spill. "We need permission to drill in safer areas, including the uninhabited arctic land of ANWR," Palin says. Here's her post from Facebook on Wednesday:
This is a message to extreme "environmentalists" who hypocritically protest domestic energy production offshore and onshore. There is nothing "clean and green" about your efforts. Look, here's the deal: when you lock up our land, you outsource jobs and opportunity away from America and into foreign countries that are making us beholden to them. Some of these countries don't like America. Some of these countries don't care for planet earth like we do - as evidenced by our stricter environmental standards.
With your nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you're doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You're not preventing environmental hazards; you're outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous.
Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.
We need permission to drill in safer areas, including the uninhabited arctic land of ANWR. It takes just a tiny footprint - equivalent to the size of LA's airport - to tap America's rich and plentiful oil and gas up north. ANWR's drilling footprint is like a postage stamp on a football field.
But it's not just ANWR; it's our Petroleum Reserve, too. As Governor Sean Parnell noted today in the Wall Street Journal:
"Federal agencies are also now blocking oil development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Although familiar with ANWR, most Americans are less likely to know about NPR-A and how vital it is to our energy security. Given recent developments, it's time to elevate the position this area holds in our national discourse.
NPR-A, a 23 million acre stretch of Alaska's North Slope, was set aside by President Warren Harding in 1923 for the specific purpose of supplying our country and military with oil and gas. Since 1976 it has been administered by the Department of the Interior, and since 1980 it has been theoretically open for development. The most recent estimates indicate that it holds 12 billion barrels of oil and 73 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
In addition to containing enormous hydrocarbons, NPR-A is very close to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which means that there would be relatively little additional infrastructure needed to bring this new oil to our domestic market.
But even here, progress has been stalled."
Radical environmentalists: you are damaging the planet with your efforts to lock up safer drilling areas. There's nothing clean and green about your misguided, nonsensical radicalism, and Americans are on to you as we question your true motives.
- Sarah Palin