First, Palin is not an idiot. You have listened/read the liberal media way to much. (You sound brainwashed on this. Whatever...)
Second, you are not the world’s only conservative environmental scientist. That was my first career. I left to get into a more “clean” field years ago. But, I still have lots of friends working in the environmental industry, and nearly all of them are conservative. They do what I suspect you do (and what I did years ago): keep the left-wing nut-job regulators from running roughshod over industry clients.