I don’t know if Justin Ready of the Maryland GOP intended for me to comment in this way, but when he sent out this article by Foon Rhee of the Boston Globe regarding a statement by Presidential hopeful John McCain regarding his energy policy, it raised my hackles a little bit. Here’s two excerpts:
“We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them,” he plans to say, according to excerpts provided by his campaign. “Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.”
(snip)
McCain says he would set limits on greenhouse gases and allow the sale of rights of excess emissions — what is known as a cap and trade system. “By the year 2012, we will seek a return to 2005 levels of emission, by 2020, a return to 1990 levels, and so on until we have achieved at least a reduction of sixty percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050,” he says.
You know, we just got finished with this argument in Maryland and what killed a similar bill proposed by the O’Malley Administration was the prospect of losing a large number of union jobs in a steel plant. Thus, it follows that enacting such legislation on a national scale would drive the already-shrinking number of manufacturing jobs that we have offshore, probably to China.
What’s even more unfortunate is that Senator McCain is listening to scientists with a political agenda and not looking at the actual facts to see that the global temperature peaked 10 years ago and this past winter was among the coldest on record in a number of locations. In fact, yesterday as I read this we had a howling nor’easter going and it was just 45 degrees out – in the middle of May!
Unfortunately, none of the three leading contenders for the presidency seem to have the sense to figure out that mankind could do very little with the climate and nature in general even if they tried – in just the last week, thousands lost their lives in Asia during two separate catastrophic but natural events.
I will grant Senator McCain one point, part of his presentation was spent advocating the expansion of nuclear power and I’m not opposed to that. But I think our energy policy should focus on securing and using resources which are commonly available domestically, not bending to the will of a small group of politically-motivated scientists and others with a radical agenda.
