The NYTimes has a front page article, Palin’s Pipeline Is Years From Being a Reality, up right now that deserves immediate attention. It examines the central legislative accomplishment that one Sarah Palin has been touting as evidence of her Executive 'experience', and finds her claims to be lacking, once again.
Here's the money 'graph -
The pipeline exists only on paper. The first section has yet to be laid, federal approvals are years away and the pipeline will not be completed for at least a decade. In fact, although it is the centerpiece of Ms. Palin’s relatively brief record as governor, the pipeline might never be built, and under a worst-case scenario, the state could lose up to $500 million it committed to defray regulatory and other costs.
Basically, Palin has been claiming this pipeline deal as a preordained success, when the reality is that it may never happen at all. The whole strange debate she seems to be having with herself on the topic of energy leads to a few central self-contradictory points.
- She claims to have fought against, and that she will continue the fight against, "big oil".
- She ran against incumbent governor Murkowski in 2006 as being too cozy with "big oil".
- The main argument she made against his coziness to "big oil"? His own pipeline deal, which the legislature never approved.
- Ironically, the company which received the contract for the pipeline, TransCanada, needs to secure shipping rights across the land it will build on from the "big oil" companies which didn't participate in the bidding process (BP-Conoco is actually currently planning to build their own pipeline to access the same fields, with Federal certification, which could significantly alter the terms under which any further deals would be made between them and a much smaller company such as TransCanada, not to mention making the original pipeline potentially obsolete).
- Not that this is necessarily the reason that TransCanada got the deal, but
Of the Palin aides familiar with TransCanada from those earlier negotiations, Ms. Rutherford had an unusually close connection. For 10 months in 2003, she was a partner in a consulting and lobbying firm whose clients included Foothills Pipe Lines Ltd., a subsidiary of TransCanada.
Ms. Rutherford said in an interview that after TransCanada submitted its pipeline proposal to the Palin administration, she and the governor never discussed whether her role on the team might be viewed as improper or give the appearance of a conflict of interest.
One could certainly claim that getting approval from the Alaska state legislature on a deal such as this is a success in its own right, as various governors had attempted to do so since the Carter administration, according to the article. But instead of chalking that up as a victory, and the initiation of a process, Palin greatly exaggerates the state of the project and leapfrogs over the various processes necessary for it to even begin to lead to construction -
"And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence," said Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. "That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart."
This for a pipeline which, if all regulatory hurdles are cleared with maximum efficiency, would not be operational until 2018! I do hope we've moved beyond fossil fuels and the need to generate hydrocarbons as a byproduct of energy generation by then. But I guess its possible that tons and tons of natural gas will be necessary then, who knows? But really, since Alaskan taxpayers had to pay TransCanada a non-refundable $500 million retainer to sign on to this deal (a full 10% of the state's budget surplus), and since there is no legal obligation for TransCanada to build the pipeline, even if all hurdles and obstacles are fully cleared, that gas may never leave the ground, and Alaskans might end up screwed the hell over. Who cares though, right? It sounds great in a speech about 'Executive experience'!