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VP pick Palin wins environmentalist ‘Dodo’ prize

As prizes go, it’s probably not one you’d want on your trophy shelf: the Center for Biological Diversity’s Rubber Dodo award.

This year’s recipient is governor of Alaska and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

“She richly deserves it,” says Tim Ellis, spokesman for the Tucson-based group. “Her environmental record is a disaster and we just wanted to draw attention to that.”

The handsome trophy, pictured above, honors Palin “for seeking to block Endangered Species Act protection for the polar bear, lying about, then suppressing state scientific reviews, and denying that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming.”

The trophy will be mailed to the governor’s mansion sometime this week, I’m told.

“It’s just about ready to fly north,” says Ellis.

Despite the fairly obvious meltdown occurring in her home state – thawing permafrost, disappearing sea ice, unseasonably warm winters and generally weird weather – Palin still doesn’t believe that human activity is having an impact on the climate.

“A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made,” Palin told the right-wing magazine Newsmax earlier this summer.

It’s a view that puts her to the right even of the leaders of her own party.

It was the Bush administration’s Department of the Interior, after all, that finally labeled the polar bear as ‘threatened,’ (albeit without taking any actions that would protect the bear’s habitat from offshore oil drilling or carbon emissions.)

If Palin doesn’t believe in manmade climate change, well, I suppose that’s her right.

But where she crossed the line from fool to crook was by using her power as governor of Alaska to obscure the work of biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, critics say.

Palin claimed that studies by state biologists cast doubt on the conclusions of federal scientists, who had determined that vanishing sea ice threatened the bears. Without scientific consensus, she said, listing the bears as endangered or threatened was a mistake.

“I strongly believe that adding them to the list is the wrong move at this time. My decision is based on a comprehensive review by state wildlife officials of scientific information from a broad range of climate, ice and polar bear experts,” she wrote in a New York Times editorial.

But through a Freedom of Information Act request, a University of Alaska got his hands on the studies in question — which said nothing of the sort.

“Essentially, she lied,” University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner told ABC News.

The move vaulted her over the opposition and earned her the coveted Rubber Dodo – and the enmity of environmental crusaders like Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.

“To maintain her ludicrous opposition to protecting the polar bear in the face of massive scientific consensus, Palin stepped over the line to lie about and suppress government science,” Suckling said in a statement.

The irony is, of course, that John McCain was supposedly one of the few Republicans that actually got global warming.

He’s proposed legislation – co-sponsored with Joe Lieberman – that would have put the U.S. on track to cut emissions.

And here he is nominating for his vice-president a woman who basically thinks climate change is some kind of liberal bogeyman cooked up by environmentalists.

In our view, McCain, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to get elected, shoved Mother Earth under the bus.

And what does this all have to do with Arizona? Maybe more than you think.

Recent studies suggest that we here in the desert may be more closely linked to the health of the Arctic sea ice than previously believed.

It seems that fluctuations in the sea ice may be linked to weather patterns in the Pacific Ocean. In particular, as sea ice declines, more storm systems from the Pacific may head north, bypassing the Southwest.

It does strike me as an interesting coincidence that the so-called Medieval Warm Period happened to coincide with the mega-drought in the Southwest that led to the fall of the Anasazi civilization.

In any case, fly, dodo, fly.

In Tempe, reactions mixed to Palin’s experience

TEMPE — Alaska governor Sarah Palin accepted the Republican party’s nomination for vice president this week, using more barbs than her running mate and earning a grudging respect and guarded optimism from some locals.

Palin’s acceptance speech was a culmination of her tightly knit family life, cutting out the doubts her opponents brought to the surface, while showing her enthusiastic support for Arizona Senator John McCain.

And with that came the inevitable mudslinging towards the opposing Democratic Party and candidates Barack Obama and his vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden.

“But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform – not even in the state senate,” Palin said, referring to Obama.

She went on to say that Obama’s goals were to increase government size, take more money away from the people and generally reduce the strength of America on a global scale.

If elected on Nov. 4, Palin said she and McCain would lay down more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create clean-coal jobs, and pursue other alternative sources of energy such as solar and wind power.

The speech garnered a mixed reaction around Tempe and the second largest university in the nation.

“It might be difficult to pass some of the bills that she’s proposing,” says Nedda Reghabi, an Arizona State University economics senior. “I do however think it’s a good idea to start looking into alternative energy sources.”

Palin used her past experiences as mayor and governor in Alaska as examples of her tenacity as a leading official.

She discussed how while seated as Governor she promised an immense ethics reform which eventually became the current law. She also mentioned her success in bringing revenue back to Alaskans when gas and oil prices skyrocketed, vetoing nearly $500 million in wasteful spending, and fostering Alaska’s state budget surplus that could reach up to $9 billion next year, according to the Los Angeles Times .

Tempe Vice Mayor Shana Ellis said that although Palin was a dark horse candidate, she has held an elected office and is qualified to be vice president.

But others say Palin’s experience places her somewhere in between rookie and veteran status. Longtime Valley pundit Richard Herrera, an associate professor of political science at ASU, said that in the event where Palin would have to take over as President, her background suggests she doesn’t have the same experience level as most vice presidential candidates although she is not the least experienced candidate to be chosen.