Of the Coleman and Al Franken campaigns’ increasingly aggressive ballot challenges, Coleman said, “There are games being played on both sides and it would be great if people put the games aside.” He disavowed personal involvement in the recount’s nitty-gritty — “I’m not involved in day-to-day recount stuff” — but offered what seemed an informed opinion: “I would bet that most of the challenges are going to be dismissed.”

Asked about any awkwardness in his position as a sitting senator who may or may not have won re-election, Coleman responded: “I’m still senator. I believe I’m a winner. … I’m proceeding with the belief that we prevailed the first night, prevailed in the certification and we’ll prevail again.”

Coleman repeatedly denied being caught up in the recount hysteria. “‘I’m not walking around wringing my hands worrying about the recount,” he said. “I haven’t checked today to see where we’re at.” He did however cop to having checked the recount stats online Thursday night.

“We started out with the lead. I’m pretty confident we’ll end up with the lead,” Coleman said. “We have got a good canvassing board. I have faith we’ll get it done the Minnesota way. … I just want to get the recount done.”

In case anyone might have somehow gotten a different message, Coleman insisted: “I think this a fair process.”

Coleman, asked about his Nov. 5 statement that Democrat Al Franken should halt the then-impending recount, said he wouldn’t say the same thing today.  ”I ascribe that to not having slept for three days,” he said.

Coleman made his remarks at a press conference this afternoon at a nuclear plant training facility in Monticello, Minn. (Coleman’s staffers couldn’t eject the Minnesota Independent from this press event as they did on Wednesday, since this time we covered it via The Uptake’s video livestream.) The official topic of the presser was energy policy. “I don’t think anybody … rejected the drill-baby-drill mantra,” Coleman said in response to a question about his continued support for lifting restrictions on domestic oil exploration.

“I’m a great believer” that America will eventually be able to reprocess its nuclear waste, Coleman said.

Video via The Uptake

Related: MnIndy video: Coleman’s staff ejects reporter from press conference

Bachmann writes:

“Faced with a looming bail-out of the financial sector hovering around the $700 billion dollar mark, I’ve signed a letter written by Congressman Joe Barton (Ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee) urging the President to consider opening up ANWR and the Eastern Gulf of the OCS to improve our energy security, lower energy prices, and provide needed revenue to the Treasury to help shoulder the burden the bail-out will place on the American taxpayer.”

At the best estimate, the government stands to make $191 billion in revenues over the next 30 years by opening up ANWR and the outer continental shelf to oil drilling.

Meanwhile, oil prices increased by a record amount Monday, driven mainly by speculation and the short squeeze loophole in commodities trading.

“No war threat, pipeline leak, ship wreck – nothing, yet up goes oil nearly $25 a barrel,” said Tim Hamilton, a petroleum industry consultant told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Perhaps speculation is a greater factor than actual supply and demand.”

For the past several weeks, Sarah Palin has aggressively harvested Alaska’s mythic cultural status on a national political stage. In addition to her near-daily odes to guns, hockey and mooseburger, Palin has also reinforced the perception of Alaska as a vast frontier land where environmental concerns and resource extraction converge harmoniously. By explaining, as she did to the right wing throwbacks at Newsmax, that Alaska would experience the consequences of climate change in unique ways, she has repeatedly implied that her leadership on climate change has been cautious and realistic.

It hasn’t. Though Palin and the legislature authorized $13 million for erosion control in a handful of the most vulnerable Alaska Native villages, the state has done nothing to reduce its carbon emissions. Palin did create a Climate Change Sub-Cabinet, but its duties are restricted almost entirely to gathering information that might help the state respond to climate change. More innovative policy suggestions have not been pursued. When University of Alaska marine biologist Rick Steiner suggested to Governor Palin that tax revenues from the oil industry be used to fund a Climate Response Fund, she dismissed the idea with the suggestion that that the federal government — that is to say, taxpayers from the rest of the country — might be able to fund Alaska’s needs instead.

For someone who boasts daily about her heroic confrontations with the oil and gas plutocrats, Palin has a remarkably pliant relationship with the hydrocarbons industry. It’s true, of course, that Palin and the state legislature raised taxes on oil profits from 22.5 to 25 percent. But it warps credulity to present this as evidence of Palin’s inner determination to stick it to the fat cats. Though she prides herself on evicting lobbyists from her offices, it’s hard to imagine why representatives from British Petroleum, ExxonMobil or ConocoPhillips would spend money to sway a public official who endorses nearly everything they do.

Indeed, when Palin came into office, her administration retained its predecessor’s opposition to a multi-state lawsuit that accused the EPA of failing to regulate emissions standards in new vehicles. Fearing that a successful case might bode poorly for the oil and gas producers on which the state’s economy depends, former Governor Frank Murkowski had filed a respondent’s brief in Massachusetts, et. al., v. Environmental Protection Agency, arguing with several other states — Michigan, Ohio, Texas and South Dakota among them — that the Clean Air Act does not permit federal curtailment of greenhouse gases. As a candidate, Palin had endorsed the filing; in the spring of 2007, the Supreme Court ruled against the EPA.

Meantime, Palin has blessed the extractive industries with her support for oil and gas drilling in ANWR, the Chukchi Sea, and elsewhere around the state. And though she avowed her opposition to the massive Pebble Mine during the 2006 campaign, Palin has show signs of having changed her mind on a project that would primarily benefit mining companies abroad while posing acute environmental risks to in Bristol Bay — home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery (and the waters for which Palin’s most famous daughter was named). A week before being tapped by McCain for the VP slot, she violated the spirit if not the letter of state law by publicly speaking out against a ballot initiative that would have jeopardized the mine’s future. Her Department of Natural Resources was also scolded by a state watchdog commission for publishing misleading and false information about the ballot measure on its own website.

More recently, and to great national derision, the state of Alaska filed a suit in federal court challenging the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s designation of polar bears as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Issued this past May, the federal polar bear listing drew on a large body of peer-reviewed scientific data demonstrating that Arctic sea ice coverage during the summer months had declined rapidly in recent years. The data also strongly suggested population declines in the South Beaufort Sea — located off Alaska’s North Slope — and the Western Hudson Bay in Canada. Additional studies have observed declining cub survival rates, as well as declining skull size and overall weight for cubs and adult males, all of which strongly suggest that nutritional and other environmental stresses are affecting the polar bear population.

The bear habitat of the Southern Beaufort sea resembles several others — the Chukchi, Laptev, Kara and Barents seas — where a third of the world’s bears reside. Based on computer modeling that has accurately tracked with recent summer ice data, the informed scientific consensus, described extensively in the 93-page final ruling, suggests that summer ice will diminish optimal polar hear habitat by more than 40 percent by mid-century. Unabated, these conditions could eventually threaten at least two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population.

Governor Palin, as promised, rejected the listing, arguing that it had not relied on “the best scientific and commercial data available.” In a New York Times op-ed piece that appeared in January, Palin deceptively wrote that “state biologists are studying the health of polar bear populations and their habitat” — implying that Alaskan biologists disagreed with the science behind the ESA listing. The state of Alaska, in fact, has not employed a polar bear expert for well over three decades. And as Steiner discovered recently through a federal FOIA request, the state’s marine mammal experts in the Department of Fish and Game actually endorsed the science behind the polar bear ruling as well as with nine US Geological Survey studies that provided additional support to the reigning consensus.

The Palin administration’s pro-development, anti-science approach to polar bears is typical of its overall approach to environmental policy. In addition to its repellent “predator control program,” the state is currently fighting efforts to protect the Cook Inlet beluga whale population, which has been reduced by 75 percent over the past two decades. Such a listing would prove inconvenient to oil, gas, and coal mining interests, which have been allowed to use the inlet as a massive industrial toilet. The listing might also impair the construction of the other “Bridge to Nowhere” at Knik Arm, a project that Palin continues to support, so long as federal funds can be used to build it.

Sarah Palin’s record on the environment is, in a word, terrible. If you’ve admired the Bush administration’s hostility toward the environment and were hoping for an additional four years of science-free public policy from the nation’s chief executives, the prospect of a McCain-Palin victory in November should send you into peals of rapturous praise. Where true believers hear in Sarah Palin the voice of an authentic conservative, others have discerned the faint soundtrack of circus music she brings to the campaign. Hostile toward data that might compromise her pro-development evangelism, Palin embodies a willful ignorance toward professional science that runs counter to her defenders’ insistence that she is a pragmatic leader. The possibility that Palin, as vice president, might be responsible for crafting a framework for America’s energy policy should set the nation’s teeth on edge.

David Noon is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, the author of the great, sort-of-on-hiatus Axis of Evel Knievel blog, and a contributor to Lawyers, Guns and Money.