Sarah Palin’s Misguided Energy Policies

Alaskan coastline eroding into the sea as glaciers and permafrost melts.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s attack on President Obama’s climate plan [“The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End,” op-ed, July 14] distorted the proposal’s economic impact and ignored the economic and ecological damage associated with global warming.

The United States Climate Action Partnership — a coalition of some of the country’s largest energy companies, manufacturers and environmental groups — supports the pending legislation because the costs of failing to address climate change far outweigh the costs of moving to a clean-energy economy.

Ms. Palin should understand this: Research from the University of Alaska at Anchorage predicts that melting permafrost in Alaska will cost the state more than $3.6 billion in infrastructure damage over the next two decades, while scholars at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks have found that warmer ocean temperatures are increasing disease in the state’s economically important salmon fisheries.