Sarah Palin - A "Know Nothing" in the Climate Debate

Sarah Palin is a know nothing. We can't afford another "know nothing" White House.

I don't make that charge lightly. I make it because she, like Bush and others on the right who have made a practice of expressing skepticism about human driven climate change, equivicates her answers by making note of the "controversy" surrounding the question of human activity as a driving force and brushing off it's importance as a cause for the climate change.

Paul Krugman recently defined Know Nothingism this way:

Know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.

Palin's evasive answers about her views on climate change show that it is unlikely that she could ever provide the kind of nuanced and urgent leadership that our climate situation demands. She comes from that group of people, for whom ignorance is not only not a problem, it's positively a virtue.

With the challenges of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels that we face, and climate becoming more and more unpredictable, we just can't afford even four more years of inaction and kowtowing to the carbon based energy industries. And that is, for a fact, what we will get if Sarah Palin ever has a hand in what happens in the White House.