Failed US vice-presidential candidate and conservative heroine Sarah Palin has laid the blame for last month’s Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster on what she termed “extreme environmentalists”.
Commenting on her Facebook page Mrs Palin said environmentalist campaigns to prevent drilling ecologically sensitive areas was the reason oil companies had to resort to expensive and dangerous drilling in unsafe areas. Slamming the green bloc as “hypocrites” Palin said “there is nothing 'clean and green' about your efforts. With your nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you're doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet”.
She laid into the environmentalists saying “Your hypocrisy is showing. You’re not preventing environmental hazards; you're outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous”. Mrs Palin was thwarted by the environmentalist bloc when she sought to permit drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. The reserve is believed to hold about 20 billion barrels of oil.
She lambasted the “protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow-water drilling” that she said prevented drilling in safer areas. The spill from the BP owned rig has seen over 20 million barrels of oil pollute the ocean and coastline near the US state of Louisiana
