Sarah Palin: Gibberish We Can Believe In?
Energy is supposed to be Sarah Palin’s strong point, right? After all, she is the Governor of Alaska, and more to the point, was the chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the agency that is supposed to "protect the public interest in exploration and development of oil and gas resources, while ensuring conservation practices, enhancing resource recovery, and protecting the health, safety, environment, and property rights of Alaskans." But when she was asked about ensuring that the fruits of domestic oil drilling would go to the domestic market, her answer was complete gibberish. By now, most of you have seen the video or read the transcript of her answer:
Oil and coal? Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.
Most people who’ve commented on this have just written it off as incomprehensible nonsense, especially the bit about flagging molecules, but I think ‘flagging molecules’ is the key to understanding what’s going on inside Palin’s brain. When I first heard this, I immediately noticed something that others had not. That answer is not just gibberish. It’s gibberish from somebody whose grasp of the basic facts about energy markets is superficial and tenuous, at best.
Nine years ago, I was hired for my first software development job for an energy company. The company sent me to a short course covering the basics of the energy business. The very first page of the course materials was titled ‘Fungible commodities’ and described the worldwide market for energy industry raw materials (oil, coal, and natural gas). Palin started her answer with a very basic point that was actually germane to the question, albeit apparently contradictory to where she ended up. If oil is a fungible commodity, export bans are pointless. (I’m not necessarily endorsing the linked book’s conclusion, it was just the first source I found that made the traditional argument.)
The second most memorable part of that course I took was the explanation of natural gas pipelines. The pipeline companies deliver gas from one place to another, but they don’t necessarily ‘ship’ it. When a company pays to ship natural gas from Point A to Point B, it doesn’t mean that the natural gas they put on the pipeline at Point A actually ends up at Point B. All natural gas is the same (i.e. it is fungible), so you don’t necessarily get back the same stuff you put in. As the American Gas Association explains:
Displacement transactions permit the lateral movement of gas through a transportation network. The configuration of many pipelines is such that it may not be apparent whether a given movement of gas is forward or backward from the point of receipt. It can be argued that all transportation service is performed by displacement as the physical delivery of the same molecules of gas is impossible.
Palin riffs from one aspect of fungibility to another before she starts her policy response to the question. That response is heavy with emotional terms (‘very, very hungry’, ‘holding the bag’, ‘got to flow to domestic markets first’) without any clear sense of what the policy is (Are export bans good or bad, who can tell from that answer?) This is the sort of answer you get from inexperienced people trying to hide their inability to apply the facts they know to a real situation. We saw the same thing in the Gibson interview (‘Charlie, don’t blink’ seemed to be the core theme there), but we expected it when she talked about foreign policy. For someone who John McCain claims "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America", Sarah Palin’s energy policy gibberish seems suspiciously like the results of late-night test cramming, not the product of real experience.
Wow…a remarkable — and seemingly accurate — deconstruction of Palin’s BS. Palin’s handlers appear to have loaded her up with some catch-phrases to develop the “energy expert” meme – and she blew it.
Sarah Palin, you’re no Ronald Reagan. Reagan could blather on any subject, generally with just as little idea of what the real issues were – but what came out of his mouth sounded coherent, and usually was embraced by the MSM as the truth.
Need we revisit GW’s verbal blunders in his pursuit of the Presidency (including the audio receiver stuffed in the back of his suit jacket to prompt him during his debate with Kerry), in order to remind voters that only the dumbest MFs on earth are considered for high office by the Republican Party? They don’t call them “puppets” for nothin’!
Between McCain and Palin, can they even figure out how to split the tab for dinner, with tip?
If no one calls her on it when she does it, she wins.
Gosh, you made a lot more sense out of what she said than a mere mortal could do. We hope of more of the same from Sarah, especially in the debate.
She’ll probably be wired to her puppeteers during the debates, just like McCain will be.
That won’t guaranty that she won’t make mistakes. Suppose she gets the same Q in the debate and someone whispers “fungible” in her ear, and then she goes off.
BTW, WO, what kind of razor do you use? A minimalist one?
I prefer to describe as a parsimonous one.
Ha!
Those are awfully big words. Could she be a closet elitist?
Marcy: Did you catch this?
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/22/mccain-irish/
It could have to do with the fact that each of McCain, Palin, Biden & even Obama, in common with every POTUS, every first runner-up in an election to be POTUS, every VPOTUS, and the overwhelming majority of serious contenders for either post, has or had identifiable roots in Ireland.
Perhaps Mad King George III, or Lord Cornwallis of Suffolk, the nobleman to whom he commissioned an army to suppress insurgency in the American Colonies [only to suffer ignoble defeat at Yorktown, particularly as to irony for its having been contested in an arena historically favored by Imperial England, a “siege” [as distinct from the more recently fashionable American “surge”], demonstrated some prescience as to this phenomenon when, en route to returning home, that same defeated and deeply frustrated army was, in what may be a peculiarly imperial way, commissioned to effect a “surge” to respond to the nascent stages of an uprising in the northwest part of His Majesty’s territory of Ireland, instigated by native peasants protesting the imminent starvation of themselves and their families from a recent hike in the taxed portion of crops by agents of their English absentee landlords and the extension of English claims of “eminent domain” over the lands that apparently had supported them for some period [possibly for as far back as the recession of the most recent ice age], the so-called White Boy Uprising [in recognition of its origins being traced to a rebel group in County Mayo], which ended, as it seems surges have a tendency to, in an ‘ethnic cleansing’ if you will, which left, among impressions left on the Irish peoples, the spectacle of forty thousand Irishmen nailed to and left to die on crosses erected beside the main road from Killarney to County Mayo.
Or it could just be a typical Republican election tactic rendered from the usual combination of characteristically limitless hypocrisy and a crude but ingeniously amplified dog whistle aimed at white racists.
So hard to tell the difference.
The really terrible things that were done to Ulster (northern Ireland) were done in the C17, by James I (James the first of one and half a dozen of the other — ie, he was James VI of Scotland) and by Cromwell.
They forcibly resettled large numbers of Scots Presbyterians, themselves poor and desperate, over to Ireland, knowing that that would create religio-political problems for the locals, and then they just kept rattling the cages. It is one of the longest saddest stories I know. Robert MacNeil, Lehrer’s old co-host, has written about this a bit, and about the migration of the Irish Scots-Irish to the U.S.
Yup. That too.
Besides that my some of my own ancestors were forcibly displaced into Ireland from Wales, I’m habitually wary of contests ranking the abuses of post-Elizabethan [the one] Imperial Britain.
I do know the presence of the White Boys in Mayo in the first place had much to do with their own ancestors being pushed west and north from the more agriculturally fertile and productive center of the Emerald Isle, in the policy you describe. Otherwise I’ll just accept you’re point- which to be clear means some of the other abuses England heaped on Ireland were objectively worse than crucifying 40,000 in a matter of a few weeks.
Having been to both countries a number of times, its my experience that raising this subject in one gets you a free pint of Guiness and in the other gets you an argument or worse.
I remain unclear as to relative disapprobation that ought to be attributed to displacing between 2.5 to 5 million and causing the death of some number between 300,000 and a million Iraqis. I suspect my shortcomings in this regard arise in some part from having spent over two thirds of my life under the protection of the sorts of folks responsible [or more precisely “responsible”] for having caused these sorts of outcomes.
Most favorable interpretation: McCain is reminding everybody that illegal immigrants come from places other than Mexico.
That sounds as if she reached in a basket, pulled out some words and said “okay, I’ll use these.” Appalling nonsense.
I actually think it’s worse than random. There’s some logic to the connections, but none to reality. Remember this woman’s big political victory was renegotiating a natural gas pipeline. You would’ve thought she’d learn a bit more than the elevator pitch about the business from that.
Good point.
Yeah, I think WO is right. It is not random; whether on her own or from being coached up by McCain team “experts”, Palin learned a couple of key concepts such as fungibility and the description of “flagging molecules” to explain it, and she STILL couldn’t eke out a coherent thought on it. Anybody here reading a couple of paragraphs from WO could do far better in the clutch; yet Palin got a hell of a lot more edifying than that and STILL couldn’t make the grade. She wants to be Vice-President and just doesn’t have the chops for it. End of story.
A friend of mine keeps telling me not to dismiss Palin because of the gibberish. He says I’m way too linear and reality-based and risk underestimating her impact, referring me to a recent post at HuffPo by Lakoff. While I only grudgingly admit his point, I do think it is the key to why this part of what Marcy says
is the key to Palin’s ability to garner so much support when many of us think she is an incoherent nutbag.
Um… Don’t blame Marcy, I wrote this post…
I agree that we shouldn’t underestimate Palin, but we shouldn’t overestimate her either. The more exposure she gets in less controlled settings, the fewer people are impressed with her. The VP debate represents a real danger for McCain-Palin. I think they have far more to lose than gain from it, but they can’t cancel it. Palin’s probably praying for a natural disaster to use an excuse to get out of it.
Oops, put me in the category of not noticing the author.
Oops sorry. 2 AM brain. I agree with you and am looking forward to seeing both McSame and Palin get shredded in the debates…my friend just wants me to quit being smug.
And it is a terrific post, WO! I can think of no better compliment than being mistaken for Marcy… made me look up fungible and everything!
Watch the Naomi Klein “Shock Doctrine” preview:
http://bigdanblogger.blogspot.com/
Hey, Sarah, flag this molecule.
Ask Sarah how she feels about this Mossad/CIA False Flag op in Pakistan:
http://www.daily.pk/politics/p…..rines.html
Is this the kind of shit you’ll be recommending as “Cheney with tits?”
OT
ACLU won at Appeals court for release of rest of Pentagon prisoner abuse pics. My guess is that admin will go to SCOTUS next. Anything to postpone it until after the elections.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/….._0922.html
This is a good moment to remind everyone that McCain was tortured before he was for it.
Sarah Palin on the economy:
Oil is not fungible. Crude oil supply from different sources cannot be handled alike. Every refinery technologist knows this.
For examples: Vanadium content is a [refinery process] catalyst poison. Sulfur [sour]content severely restricts which refineries can process it. The density [API grade] determines what process is used to result in what product ratio, as gasoline vs diesel.
Oil traders often use the term “fungible” for crude oil as the commodity traded from a particular location, like Cushing, OK or Brent[North Sea], or WTI [West Texas Intermediate],Ghawar [Saudi],etc.
One real problem is that crude supplies are now increasingly heavy or sour whereas refineries mostly handle light or sweet. New refineries or upgrading older ones to handle heavy/sour are very expensive, so without guaranteed hi-prices for refined products, who will invest?
Syncrude [Can. tar sands],shale oil, Chavez’ Orinoco, etc offer humungous amounts proven reserves…awaiting prices to justify investment to get it to the yet-unbuilt refineries that can process it.
Isn’t it true that the Tar Sands oil of Alberta (expensive to extract and process) became profitable when oil reached $50 per barrel? Prior to that price, it was too costly to extract and process to make a profit. Of course, we are more than double that price now so Tar Sands oil should be quite profitable in spite of the cost to separate it from sand and boggy pits.
Having mis-spent about a decade of my professional career involved in litigation and arbitration over oil and gas and electrical transmission rates and revenue allocations, I can’t imagine ever claiming the level of expertise attributed by Senator McCain to Governor Palin over the panopoly of issues related to energy. However…
As I appreciate the Canadian oil sands, or tar sands, situation, the provincial government in the Canadian province in which most of it is found, and to this point at least all of it that has been “developed” [a concept that, like with coal mining in West Virginia, is perhaps somewhat better appreciated as critically engaging such highly scientific and delicate processes as tearing the cover off Mother Earth to get to it and then pulling it out like a giant kid in a sand box with a giant shovel], in some unequal form of ‘partnership’ with a number of multi-national mega-companies acting through a couple of licensed butchers going by the names Suncor and Syncrude, has been actively involved in capitalizing the “mines” located on formerly richly diverse traditional hunting grounds within a few hours drive of a community no doubt named in tribute to one of the more legendary native chiefs: Fort McMurray [either that or a trading outpost for one of the licensees of the British imperial monarchy, in that case I think the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company], since the early 1970s.
The big expense in such ventures being in start up costs, the existing infrastructure for the most part having been in full production for over a decade now, I would expect the effective marginal costs to continue producing the equivalent of a barrel of the dirty, smelly, highly toxic, aptly named “crude” by now are more on the order under $20 [quite apart from long term financing, general and custom refinement- most that’s done in the same area and represents at least three quarters of the national contribution to atmospheric pollution-, transportation, and post-depletion environmental recovery programs- which I suspect continue to be more theoretical than real].
Doing it all over again now would cost some currently actually or nearly uncompetitive multiple of $20. Just extrapolating a guess here, but if the current world price of crude were at $80 and projected to stay there for a a decade I would not expect any more Canadian oil sands projects to be started for at least half a decade. The fact that MORE such projects ARE starting up, even in the adjoining province of Saskatchewan, suggests that industry economists and futurists are thinking its highly unlikely to ever get that low again. But at $100 per barrel crude for twenty years adjusted for inflation? Well, Cheney’s been visiting Alberta at an increasing rate, at some ratio inverse to his trips to visit the Saudis. Even Karl Rove’s been going there for a look see.
I figured somebody who knew what they were talking about would come along eventually. Oil as a fungible commodity is an economist’s view (it’s true enough from a pricing perspective in a closed system). Natural gas in a pipeline is the very essence of true fungibility at the molecular level. Eliding the difference between the two could have been done slickly, but Palin did it clumsily because she appears not to understand either concept very well.
Of course, answers can be given a variety of ways, and they don’t write, you know, the clauses, in a specific order. But in the sense of the writer today, they know that there are very, very voracious readers that need that answer first. So, I believe that what the writer is going to do, also, is not to write participial phrases in such a way that its readers get stuck with a blank page without the words that are written here, printed here. It’s got to be spelled out for the newsstands first.
edit… “fungible” means movable goods of which any unit can replace any other unit. It’s cute to talk aof wheat as fungible, but do not try to make Italian pasta with the wrong variety…it aint fungible except to a smug speculator from Wasilla.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your statement technically; but, to some extent, it is belied by the sheer fact that oil is traded as a commodity. Yes there are grade distinctions, many of which you list, but the fact is that oil is able to be traded on the open market, and different grades can be traded for one another at negotiated rates. In that regard, which is the critical one for the discussion, oil is indeed fungible. We are talking about the market here, and there is indeed a market for crude oil; that makes it fungible for purposes of a market discussion.
Sarah Palin’s energy policy gibberish seems suspiciously like the results of late-night test cramming, not the product of real experience.
Oh, gosh, yes. Every college teacher who has done the late-night marking of term papers would recognize Sarah at fifty paces.
I’m so torn. The English-language leaders’ debates here are scheduled for the same night as your veep debate. Our election has gone severely weird as well, and I know that I should care about it, although I’m not sure that just caring about it will do much.
But I absolutely have to watch Biden take on Palin. I mean, how can you resist?
The Times had a piece up yesterday in its Politics section on the results of the negotiations between the referees and the respective parties as to the rules to apply to the four “debates”.
The impression left was that the rules worked out for the three in what is normally seen as the Show are going to be within the pattern with which we’ve become accustomed since 1960; that is: combining all the least attractive features of a beauty pageant with the Gong Show edition of Jeopardy. It looked to me like McCain was able to secure his precious “town hall” concept for the one in the middle, for the price of Obama securing his preferred order, Crusades first, bread and water last.
I can’t help thinking McCain proved something telling about his negotiating ability: Tough-guy talk, lots of posturing ranging from firm to rigid, driving the process hard, all ending up with nothing more than the hole in a donut.
Perhaps I’m being too hard, if the real goal of was to protect Ms Palin; because under the rules that apply to her encounter with Mr Biden, even today after gawd-knows-how-many procedures on his dicky ticker, Cheney could agree to go 140 rounds with Mike Tyson at his peak, in a ring set up in one of the many open spaces equidistant from the White House and the Dome of Congress, from an opening bell at 8 p.m., then walk all the way home to the Naval Conservatory, shower, mark up the entire op-ed section of The Times, plus Froomkin, finish his hot toddy and nitro, and still make it into his casket before a 7 a.m. dawn.
Near as I can make out, if Biden even suspects he might be about to let loose with one of his famous Scranton Stingers [”noun, verb, 9/11″], first he has to file a written brief with the referee, then he has to secure the permission of his opponent, including additional time to consult with her handlers and up to 6 additional lobbyists, both on issue of whether she allows it to be said and as to her response, and if she deems in her sole discretion, with no right of review or protest to the moderator, that it’s just a litle too mean, or demeaning, or SEEMS so to her, then Biden has to go sit in a penalty box for the full period of time it takes for her to respond unopposed to the three questions, or until she feels she’s recovered her composure.
Yeah, she’s ready.
Och, LabDancer, you make me laugh, but let’s think positive.
All Joe Biden has to do is stand there and smile that Silver Fox smile. Well, if you’re a woman from the first boomer cohort, you think so, and that is a significant demographic group. There are a lot of us — remember? That’s why we’ve always irritated everyone else?
Joe will cope. Keep the faith.
Joe has two speeds: pontificating blowhard, and surprisingly incisive zinger. To the extent they are symbiotic, I suspect he could encounter some problems.
But I take your point: Joe’s been at this a long time, under an awfully wide variety of contexts- whereas, until recently, Ms Palin has been conducting her own exercises in elocution in front of a librarian, two out-of-work native fishermen, the extended family of a couple of seals, and a bachelor moose- and that even her recent experience of [finally] being greeted with the sort of adoration that typically attends the winners of beauty contests doesn’t quite prepare one for the rigors of a Q&A session funneled to an unseen audience in the tens of millions.
If the session with that ABCNews anchor [It was Ted Baxter, right? I love that guy.] is any indication, if I’m Joe, I’m planning on saying a lot of:
No no, I certainly didn’t mean to interrupt. This stuff is just… fascinating. I’m all ears, Governor Palin. Please, do go on.
Palin’s answer was incoherent. If you pull supply from Alaska off the global market to ‘keep it exclusively in the US’, it jacks up the cost of oil in the US regardless.
Maybe she was just haphazardly arguing in favor the Dept. of Interior/Petro Co.’s sex & drugs for oil scam.
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One blogger contrasted Palin’s remarks here with those of the South Carolina beauty pageant contestant who gave that rambling nonsensical answer regarding map provisions, schools and USA Americans.
Can you splain this so even I can understand it? I took a peek at the book citation WO provided, which seemed to be trying to make the case that it does no good to place bans on the exportation of domestic oil, all because of the fungibility factor. But, I don’t see how the fugibility issue is relevant, and how export bans are meaningless, leading to the position you stated.
I probably should go further and say that it seems that Palin was “trying” to cover just these points, but ended up spouting gibberish instead of the provided talking points, as WO surmised.
In simple terms, the market price of oil is determined by global supply and demand. Supply and demand are affected by everyone who produces oil and everyone who uses it. This is why it’s fungible -it doesn’t matter where it comes from or where it goes, you can’t uncouple it from global supply and demand.
You can’t remove your own piece of global supply from the market to ‘use for yourself’ without global demand going up and therefore driving market price up. What you seek to gain in lower cost or uninterrupted supply by providing for yourself, you lose in terms of increasing global demand and higher cost. Since we cannot produce ourselves to oil independence (far,far from it), there is no benefit from export embargoes if we seek to lower or stabilize the price of oil for ourselves.
That’s my two-bit take on it. I hope that makes more sense than what Palin gurgled.
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Thanks. What you say seems coherent, but, I’m not sure I accept the conclusion. Unlike some people though, I intend to study the idea before further commenting.
Re: “What you say seems coherent, but, I’m not sure I accept the conclusion.”
I think that’s what Palin et al. are counting on. It’s like she’s conjuring up a fishes and loaves miracle for people to sink their fantasies into – “we have all that we need right here. Be well!” It’s horseshit.
The US oil demand and the domestic US oil supply are grossly mismatched. An energy independence miracle is possible, it just isn’t happening with petro-carbons.
Republicans have demanded new debate rules for Palin – – so she won’t feel that she has to defend herself! I am a woman and this is insulting to any intelligent woman!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09…..bates.html
In fact, Sarah Palin is an insult to womanhood and McCain has insulted us all in trying to manipulate women’s vote in making such an obvious move.
She reminds me of the big cow patty painted with gold paint on sale at The Stockyards for $10.00.
Broken link at my 33 to the NY Times article on the VP debate rules.
I’ll find it and re-post.
Broken link at 33 should be:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09…..ref=slogin
I dont’ think the story here is so much in the answer, but in the question. On it’s face it’s just a stupid softball question, but the subtle implicaton here is that if we’re able to drill more domestically there will be so much oil we might be able to export it!
So let’s talk about what we’ll do to keep from exporting the oil we need. Boy, whoever crafted that question wasn’t shooting at the rocket scientists in the crowd, but then again there probably aren’t very many rocket scientists in those crows so….
Yak, ack, spit. The whole crowd nausiates me.
So this is my example of EW’s point, from Kevin Drum:
First, she makes up words: “impactful”. We tried a president for whom English is an opponent rather than a friend.
Second, everyone knows that construction bonds and insurance policies are issued by insurance companies, and AIG’s insurance subsidiaries are plenty solvent, enough to make major cash contributions to the reorg. In fact, one possible scenario is to sell the insurance companies to help with the reorg. So, this isn’t going to have an impact on Americans.
Third, it fails to identify the actual problem, that the AIG parent is a party to way too many out of the money credit swaps and other trash.
We know her briefers know the facts and the situation, and they must have told her. So the problem is that she is slow. She lacks a basic factual grounding in the way things are, so she has nothing on which to hang new information, which means she can’t remember stuff. Smart people like Obama know tons of stuff, so when something new comes along, they can relate it to stuff they already know and start thinking about it intelligently and quickly.
Palin is just a C student, and bone ignorant.
I’d just add that there might be a good reason she bungled the fungibles. Fishes and loaves miracle speak with domestic petroleum serves an important purpose- for Big Oil. It shifts eyeballs away from a serious push towards improving fuel efficiency and expanding alternatives. There is no rational debate left about what’s best for consumers and the planet, it’s just that improving efficiency and expanding alternatives weakens Big Oil’s handle on long term control. It’s a basic matter of self interest.
Palin’s stance favors Big Oil, not Americans’ wellbeing. The result is that, when addressing a town hall, gibberish might serve her better than explaining clearly how she’s on the wrong side of the debate.
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Time to cue up the You Tube of Miss North Carolina gibbering helplessly as a counter point to Sarah in the upcoming debates.
yer scarin me ew
I translated the passage about two days back, and I’ve been surprised that nobody else could decipher it
I didn’t have access to the “Fungible Molicules” sources, but I could understand the concept
the important thing was to catch that princess pandora was trying to sound smart, and hoping nobody would suspect she was spouting bullshit
I could put that information into a folksey statement that doesn’t use all the fancy technical terms that I don’t fully understand
basically, her answer in NO, there is no way to ensure that the oil we recover from new offshore drilling goes exclusivly to domestic markets
I dumb it down a bit for the rubes
princess pandora ain’t too bright, so she tries to smarten it up a bit for the rubes
that’s a bad way to run a con, er a campaign
It’s been clear to me all along, from the perspective of cognitive expertise, that your conclusion, ew, is exactly correct. She uses jargon but throws it around in meaningless ways…. as if she knew something. Exactly the kind of thing that someone does who wants BS through a thicket they really know nothing about.
Jargon is the tip-off. Anyone who really knows something does not try to obfuscate. Instead they unpack the information so everyone can understand. But a person who knows little to start with just flings it around, like a woman flailing a purse over her head. The contents tip out. And there’s nothing there.
She’s a very lazy thinker. But she’s a damn grasper for power.
They have been promoting Sarah as the woman you want to go hunting with even if you do not know how to hunt. That interview with ”Chhaaaarlie” said it all. Serious questions were being asked and she filled them with ”what do you mean Chhaaarlie?’
McCain was not thinking about this country when he went along with Sarah being the pick. He knows…it is written all over his face when she speaks.
Her responses are very similar to how many Americans would respond. With a lack of depth that is very dangerous. President Bush’s shoes fit her perfectly.
There is some hidden good news in this. At least she believes in molecules.