Palin's Pipeline Debacle

Sarah Palin's populist mission to thwart big oil in her home state of Alaska may be undermining the energy interests of the United States as well as her own political ambitions for a 2012 presidential run. Despite the governor's pride in championing a $40 billion natural-gas pipeline (which the Obama administration has called for to increase domestic energy supply), no such pipeline even exists yet--and it's all thanks to Palin's anti-corporate policies. "The only thing standing in the way of an Alaska gas pipeline is the Sarah Palin administration," says the Republican co-chairman of Alaska's House Finance Committee. In fact, Palin has constructed a regulatory structure so hostile to big-oil--the most capable pipeline developers--that the possibility looms that America's largest private-infrastructure project could be doomed to fail.