Sarah Palin is a Self-Proclaimed "Energy Expert" Because There's Oil in Alaska, Just Like She's a Foreign Policy Expert Because Russia is Next Door.

I hate to keep harping on Governor Palin, but unfortunately she deserves it. It is imperative that the middle America that she somehow appeals to understands how utterly inappropriate she is as a Vice Presidential Candidate, making the otherwise reasonable McCain ticket a no-deal (I'd still vote for Obama, but McCain isn't a bad guy). In the vice-presidential debate, Palin called herself an "energy expert", which, it seems, is a moniker earned in a similar manner to her supposed foreign policy prowess. By her reckoning, she is close to Russia, making her a foreign policy expert, and there's oil in Alaska, making her an energy expert.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, none of our candidates fully understand the dire nature of our global energy crisis. It's not just climate change that we should be worried about - it's peak oil. Just like the economy taking a downward spiral in a "perfect storm" of deregulation, risky mortgages, bad decisions on consumer's behalves, industry greed, and bipartisan legislative ineptitude, climate change and peak oil are intimately intertwined and we are heading straight into the eye of yet another perfect storm. By nearly all estimates, peak oil, or the time when we cannot pump anymore oil from the earth in a day, is either happening now or will happen within the next 5-20 years. What this means practically is that as daily oil extraction levels off and starts to decline, as long as demand continues to rise, we will see an astronomical spike in oil costs and worldwide shortages. Let me repeat - if we continue to use oil as we do today, within the next few years to few decades, we are guaranteed to see huge oil shortages and massive price increases. This is not supposition, it is supported by oil industry insiders, geologists, and energy experts alike and if we do not shift to alternative forms of energy quickly, starting right now, civilization as we know it, fueled by oil, will grind to a halt. Not only that, but once the oil is gone, if we haven't prepared ourselves, we'll likely fall back on the other, dirtier fossil fuel that is still plentiful - coal. This, in turn, will accelerate the already unstoppable threat of climate change.

The fact is, that offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR will give us a few measly percent of our annual oil use. The rest must still be bought from unstable Middle Eastern dictatorships, some of whom continue to funnel oil money into the hands of the very terrrorists that we are trying to defeat. We can pour money into drilling for more of a dying paradigm and building multi-billion dollar nuclear plants, neither of which will yield any power for a decade. Or, we can focus our efforts and resources on researching and building a renewable energy infrastructure for our entire country, which will protect us from the global economic collapse that will occur as peak oil hits. We will be actively fighting climate change, we will generate domestic jobs, we will wean ourselves off of foreign oil, and we can reclaim our role as a leader and innovator in the world.

Not one of our presidential or vice presidential candidates has even mentioned peak oil, and we've barely heard a peep about the environment or climate change. None of these people are energy experts, especially not Governor Palin, who continues to spew her "Drill, baby, drill" mantra. She will not bring you lower gas prices, nobody will. If you calculate the true cost of a gallon of gas, including extraction, refining, transport, and environmental impact, it should be around $12/gallon. For the better part of a century, we have enjoyed cheap gas subsidized by government tax breaks, political power plays, and even war, and now that we're starting to see fuel prices rise towards what a true and fair market price would be, Americans have cried in outrage rather than taken action to become part of the solution.

At least Senator Obama and Senator McCain recognize the importance of climate change and renewable energy, at least they have an inkling of the true crisis at hand. Governor Palin is still in denial about climate change and is proposing to waste more of the taxpayers dollars on what will become a nearly obselete energy source within our lifetimes. Sorry, but this "Joe Six-Pack" needs a leader who has the intelligence and foresight to set aside their preconcieved notions, objectively evaluate the evidence and take steps to lead us into a prosperous and sustainable future, and Sarah Palin is not that leader.