The politics of climate change
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was in the Pacific Northwest this week talking about his plans to address climate change. On Monday he broke with President Bush by calling for mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and for a 60-percent reduction in greenhouse gases from their 1990 levels by 2050. Like many others, he favors the mechanism known as cap-and-trade — capping the amount of emissions but allowing those who do not use all their emissions to sell the unused portion.
Both the Democratic presidential hopefuls, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, also promise cutting greenhouse gases through cap-and-trade measures, by even higher amounts — 80 percent below by 2050.
On Tuesday McCain told reporters that as a senator he had exerted more leadership on the climate change issue than either of the Democratic presidential contenders, adding that Clinton and Obama “have never to my knowledge been involved in legislation nor hearings nor engagement in this issue.” As the New York Times pointed out, both Clinton and Obama were co-sponsors of the emissions-reduction bill McCain penned in 2003 with Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
As McCain's news sinks in, some say he has has gone too far, while others charge that he's still behind the curve. Geoff Styles, writing the "Half Full" blog on The Energy Collective, offers a more neutral view today of McCain's stance, along with this assessment of the future of American climate change policy:
As I've noted previously, it is remarkable that out of two original fields of candidates that included such a broad spectrum of views on global warming, the three finalists — and thus the two parties' ultimate nominees — are not just expressing concern in the abstract, but have issued calls for concrete action to deal with climate change. This is a necessary precondition for a meaningful national debate on a set of measures that would permanently alter our economy, with implications for the entire world.
Here's the rest of Styles' blog.
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