As a counterpoint to last week's look at the evolution of Barack Obama's environmental philosophy, I've written a piece for Plenty Magazine looking at John McCain's shifting views on environmental policy. Bottom line: he used to be a genuine environmental hero; these days, not so much.
In January 2006, Brad Miller, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina, joined Sen. John McCain on a legislative fact-finding delegation to the South Pole. Miller recalls the lawmakers, still bundled in their emergency cold-weather gear, huddling into a tiny conference room a stone’s throw from the pole itself, where nervous climate scientists showed them ice-core data that a few months later would serve as the dramatic centerpiece of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “We were all fairly taken aback,” says Miller. But McCain was less interested in the science, which he seemed to accept at face value, than in finding ammunition to use against his opponents back in Washington; during the presentation, he bombarded the scientists with questions about whether the Bush administration or his rivals in the Senate had tried to suppress the researchers’ findings. “McCain absolutely grilled them,” Miller says. “He was really pushing these guys about whether they were allowed to say what they really thought.” Later that night, with the midnight sun still overhead, McCain buttonholed Miller in the dingy prefab hut that served as the research station’s bar and, over a beer, held forth about the importance of tackling climate change. McCain had recently read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and lectured Miller on the story of Easter Island, whose inhabitants wrecked their ecosystem and ultimately their entire society. “He seemed to be trying to impress upon me that he was a kindred spirit on the subject of the environment,” Miller says. “He said it needed to be our urgent business.”
Miller returned from the South Pole with a strong impression that McCain was sincere in his desire to tackle climate change, and serious about the necessity of putting science before politics. Lately, though, he’s started to have second thoughts. “I really worry,” says Miller, who now chairs the Investigations and Oversight subcommittee of the House Science and Technology committee. “I thought he’d be different, but now I’m not at all sure.” At the time of the South Pole trip, McCain was still being feted for penning the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, the first legislative effort to reduce America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Since then, though, McCain has refused to lend his support to other lawmakers’ climate legislation on the grounds that it did not include subsidies for the nuclear industry. He has repeatedly failed to support renewable-energy legislation, including a key bill that ultimately failed by just one vote. He has newly embraced off-shore drilling and adopted fossil-fuel friendly energy policies. And - the last straw - he’s appointed an oil-state governor who has denied humans' role in global warming as his running mate. “It’s hard to square the pick of Sarah Palin with a deep abiding conviction that the climate of the earth is changing,” says Miller.
William Buckley, a founder of the modern right-wing movement, famously described the two George Bushes as being conservative without being conservatives:; they may have taken conservative positions, he said, but they lacked any serious philosophical commitment to the tenets of conservatism. By the same token, over the years it’s become apparent that while John McCain sometimes sides with greens, he lacks the ideological consistency that marks a true environmentalist. In the quarter of a century that he’s spent in Washington, McCain’s positions have been marked by a strange – some might say erratic – blend of idealism and opportunism: he’s fought for climate legislation, and almost single-handedly kept global warming on the political agenda after the failure of the Kyoto Protocol; but he’s also repeatedly sided with corporate interests and the energy sector on a wide range of environmental and conservation issues. Despite McCain’s efforts to halt global warming, his lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters is just 24 percent, on a par with some of the most right-wing lawmakers around. “You don’t just go out and get a 24,” says Tim Greefe, the LCV’s deputy legislative director. “You really have to earn that.”
Read the rest here.