Has Sarah Palin thrown Alaska under the bus in her quest for national attention?

She doesn't want "cap and trade" on carbon emissions because she believes "it is an enormous threat to our economy,'' but the sale of carbon credits -- a form of cap and trade -- from the Kyoto agreement is helping fuel a big drive in China to replace electricity from dirty coal with electricity from wind power.

Alaska sits downwind from China. Not to be too parochial here, but anything that encourages China to clean up its air is good for Alaska.

China Longyuan, one of the major producers of wind power in China, is the hot ticket on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at the moment, according to The Economist magazine, because carbon credits it earns, "one hedge fund reckons ... will provide 70 percent of profits in the long run.''

If you are a common-sense Alaska conservative, the simple Chinese interest in "profits'' ought to excite you. Feel free to applaud capitalism's incremental corrosion of the Chinese communist system. This is Western guerrilla warfare on a global economic scale, and this time the good guys appear to be slowly winning.

Alaskans ought to wholeheartedly support this shift, but it's not the real reason to get excited about wind power in China. There's a better, purely self-serving reason.

Cleaner power in China means a healthier Alaska. Ignore the issue of climate change, global warming or whatever else Al Gore is preaching. Focus on the other issues related to China's rapid expansion of coal-fired power plants. Any number of studies are showing a build-up of mercury in Alaska, northern Canada and the North Pacific Ocean, and there is only one source for this as one Canadian researcher noted, "coal-fired power production in Asia.''

Mercury is bad stuff. It can poison people and contaminate fish so as to make them unmarketable. Sometimes you have to wonder if an Alaska salmon fishing industry so worried about the Pebble mine doesn't have its eyes on the wrong target. Pebble might or might not happen, and if it did, the development could be largely controlled under U.S. environmental rules.

China doesn't have very good environmental rules, and it is in the midst of an industrial boom that brings nothing but bad news for Alaska. Along with that mercury, particulates from its coal-fired power plants are raining down on the Arctic. Some scientists have concluded this is leading to an earlier melt of winter snows, associated climate warming and the inevitable melting of permafrost that undermines Alaska roads and buildings.

Doing anything to encourage China to get off coal and onto cleaner fuel -- wind, solar, maybe Alaska natural gas -- would be good for the 49th state, because mercury and soot aren't the only Chinese pollution problems haunting the north. There is also the matter of the acidification of the Pacific Ocean as it tries to scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The waters of the Pacific, scientists agree, are going increasingly acidic to the detriment of salmon.

Limits on global carbon emissions could help change this, too. Cutting carbon emissions, which is the topic of discussion among world leaders in Copenhagen, can't do anything but benefit salmon in particular and Alaska in general.

But here's the former governor of the 49th state publicly chastising the president for going to Copenhagen, saying he should boycott the climate change discussion because -- in her words -- the "so-called climate change experts" are meeting to try to undermine the American economy.

Actually, no. They are meeting to suggest limits on carbon emissions worldwide, and if those limits are imposed fairly, they would have little net economic affect on anyone. Look at it this way, if everyone is required to hand over a bar of gold to reduce carbon emissions, everyone remains equal in the end. Everyone is short one bar of gold.