In office, she took climate change seriously – or at least purported to. But in order to become a leader of the fundamentalist religious movement that is now the GOP, she has to invoke the Inhofe position that "God is still up there" and that any attempt to conserve our planetary inheritance is not wise stewardship but a kind of arrogant blasphemy. Insofar as Palin is able to understand these issues, she favors more oil drilling but no pollution. Yes, I know. But I have long since stopped trying to engage Palin rationally, because there is nothing rational or reality-based to engage with.

But the interesting aspect is her insistence that any attempt to mitigate climate change or develop new non-carbon energy sources is some kind of arrogance and naivete – as if the massive growth in human carbon use in the past two centuries was the divine norm for aeons. The point, however, is a classically fundaentalist one: is to posit their contemporary grip on reality as an eternal and unchanging reality under God's control, rather than a snapshot of a constantly changing and evolving planet, affected by what happens on it and beyond it. Fundamentalist religious movements can only have religious approaches to pragmatic problems. That's why Iran has to import refined gasoline, because religious fanatics know only doctrine, not reality.

If you want that kind of government in America, you know who to vote for. The Republicans will deal with the climate according to fundamentalist Biblical principles: more oil drilling, more carbon energy, and a religoius war with Islam over these resources. If that's your vision of the future, you need to become a Republican.