Yesterday, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) gave a speech on energy policy at a solar energy company, in her words, “in a manner with much substance.” She repeatedly went off the script of her prepared remarks (as Jed Lewison and Ana Marie Cox have noted), using many of her favorite locutions. One of her most common rogue phrases was a call for tapping into various sources of, well, just about anything. Her approach exposes the conservative ideology that all forms of energy are created equal; that details like cost, pollution, and long-term consequences are immaterial.

Watch it:

For those watching at home, here’s the list:

Of that list, only natural gas is a resource that can be literally “tapped into.” Palin’s use of an oil industry metaphor to describe all forms of energy and innovation is consistent with the mindset of supply-side exploitation, a dangerously simplistic approach to energy policy that only considers the short-term profit interests of energy corporations. Some of her off-script “tapping” remarks had some policy “meat,” such as her attack on solar energy:

We have many many alternative sources that have not yet been tapped into and allowed to become economic and reliable. That’s the key, of course, is the reliability of these alternative sources.

This false attack on the unreliability of renewable energy is one both she and McCain have made before.

An intriguing story from Greenwire (subs. req’d):

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said yesterday on a late-night comedy show that global warming cannot be solved without participation from Republicans, and he pledged to work with his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, on the issue no matter who wins the White House on Tuesday.

Appearing on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Obama cited climate change as an issue on which he and McCain could find common ground after this year’s bitter presidential campaign concludes.

“I hope that after the election, however way it turns out, that we can work together, because some of the problems are ones that we’re not going to be able to solve with one party just trying to dictate a solution to the problems,” Obama said via satellite from Sunrise, Fla., where his campaign held one in a series of rallies in the battleground state.

The Illinois senator then brought up climate change.

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Wherein I discuss the two candidates’ energy and environmental positions.

Pollster.com has an interesting piece on the confusing disparity among all of the polling being done for this election. In particular, “likely voter model design depends significantly on judgments that pollsters make about how to model the likelihood that any voter sampled will actually turn out and vote in the election.”

The author, Clark A. Miller, an Associate Professor at Arizona State University, notes that “the trials and tribulations of climate modelers — and also their approaches to addressing skepticism about their judgments — offer three useful insights for pollsters working with likely voter models”:

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Our guest blogger is Todd Darling, director of the documentary “A Snow Mobile for George,” a tour of deregulation in America. He owns a snow mobile.

As Politico’s Jonathan Martin tells us, “Iron Dog champ Todd Palin makes his direct mail debut in a piece aimed straight at the gut of a rural Mainers.” The letter warns snowmobiling Mainers, “Obama’s Extreme Environmental Policies” could make this “The Last Winter To Ride In Our National Parks?” The Maine Republican Party flier includes this edited quote from a Sierra Club blogger Pat Joseph:

In the end, the point that snowmobiles are loud and obnoxious and polluting seems obvious to everyone save perhaps the person actually astraddle the beast. . . . They just don’t have any business in our national parks.

Todd Palin’s flier dives straight into a barrel of red herrings.

In this flier, Palin is attempting to stoke a culture war between freedom-loving snowmobilers and tree-hugging environmentalists. But snowmobilers care about pollution and preserving the outdoors. And environmentalists love having fun. See how the flier edits the Sierra Club quote? Here’s what that dot-dot-dot eliminated from Pat Joseph’s criticism of snowmobiles in National Parks:

They are also fun. No doubt about it, they’re an absolute blast.

Mr. Palin says his wife and Senator McCain will protect snowmobile access with “practical standards.” But they don’t believe in regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, even though global warming has meant the Iron Dog competitors have raced in the rain — and in 2003, the race was even totally cancelled because of the extreme heat. It’s sure hard to protect the fun of snowmobiling if your “standards” mean the end to snow. Read more

If I could know only one thing about a presidential candidate’s understanding of energy, it is whether they get that energy efficiency is the “first fuel.” If efficiency is not the cornerstone of their energy independence and climate strategy, they will fail. It’s that simple (see “Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution, Part 1: The biggest low-carbon resource by far“).

How delightful, then, to see Obama use valuable time in his expensive half-hour political infomercial — his closing economic argument to millions of Americans — to tout McKinstry, a company that does energy efficiency retrofits.

Now efficiency is far less visually sexy than wind turbines or solar panels. That’s why anti-cleantech greenwashers from, oh, I don’t know, say Arizona and Alaska, invariably use renewable energy company backdrops — the visuals overwhelm any factual debunking of their policies that the media might do (assuming for the moment we had a media that actually ever did that kind of debunking).

So you know the candidate is serious about energy in general and efficiency in particular when they visit an energy efficiency company and then tell the nation about it:

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