How green are the candidates
After suffering through nearly eight years of a presidency
marked by singularly willful ignorance with respect to issues
relating to the environment, perhaps it’s time to ease the pain by
playing a hypothetical game.
How green are the candidates
After suffering through nearly eight years of a presidency marked by singularly willful ignorance with respect to issues relating to the environment, perhaps it’s time to ease the pain by playing a hypothetical game.
While voters are focusing on the nation’s threadbare economy, our misguided adventure in Iraq and the prospect of the nation collapsing under the weight of healthcare costs, let’s for the purposes of this assume that the environment is the only issue.
A Web site, www.procon.org, makes it easy to boil things down around whatever issues float your boat.
The site taps the candidates’ own words and assigns each a “pro” or “con” label based on what they’ve said.
The site’s worth a visit, and what emerges may produce some surprises.
Since we’re limiting ourselves to the environment, we can focus on three issues: oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, fuel efficiency and a treaty connected to carbon emissions similar to the Kyoto Accord.
The Arctic refuge (ANWR) is a vast place most of us will never be privileged to visit. A place of dramatic extremes, impossibly large landscapes and unnamed lakes and peaks, it is one of America’s last wildernesses. But underneath it lies crude oil, enough to sustain the national addiction to gasoline just a little while longer.
Drilling would certainly change the place, and it might extract a toll on some of the wildlife nearly all of us will never see. But oil, see?
Given President Bush’s connections to Big Oil, it’s no secret where the current administration comes down.
But a look at the candidates is revealing.
On the Republican side, born-again former Libertarian Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee are both ready to start the drilling. Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama join GOP Sen. John McCain in weighing in on keeping the drilling out of ANWR.
McCain in 2002 voted against an amendment that redefined coastal plains as suitable for oil drills.
Obama did not mince words in a statement made last year: “I strongly reject drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because it would irreversibly damage a protected national wildlife refuge without creating sufficient oil supplies to meaningfully affect the global market price or have a discernable impact on U.S. energy security.”
Huckabee, on the other hand, sees it as a national security issue. “While I want to reduce our dependence on oil, I especially want to reduce our dependence on imported oil as fully and quickly as possible. We need to get oil and gas from ANWR and our continental shelves,” he said in September of last year.
Clinton, on her official Web site, detailed her Senate opposition to plans to open ANWR to drilling: “Drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge is bad environmental policy, and it is bad energy policy. It would take ten years of drilling in the Arctic Refuge to produce oil. We do not need to despoil an environmental treasure on a gamble for oil where the odds of finding significant supplies are remote.”
Let’s sum up: the putative winner of the Republican nomination, McCain, and the front-runners for the Democratic nomination, Obama and Clinton, agree that Big Oil stays out.
On to fuel efficiency. Should the government mandate increasing mileage standards for automobiles?
Huckabee, in response to a direct query, elected not to respond. On the other side, Clinton, Obama and McCain again agree.
Clinton put it into numbers. “As President, I will raise the fuel efficiency standards to 40 miles per gallon by 2020 and 55 by 2030,” she said.
McCain, while claiming to be a less government advocate, makes an exception. “”There are some tough decisions that need to be made,” he said in a YouTube video. “One of them is increasing CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standards. I am a small government, less regulation, lower taxes American. But I think it’s time to raise CAFE standards.”
Okay, how about an agreement along the lines of the Kyoto Accord? The U.S. is the world’s only developed nation not to sign the treaty. Our cars and factories may be the cleanest in the world, but our lust for energy means we’re one of the world’s most significant polluters anyway.
Again, Clinton and Obama line up together: let’s invite ourselves to sit at the table for a meaningful discussion about what can be done to stem global warming. On this point, McCain is less clear. He did, however, vote “yes” on a 1997 resolution opposing U.S. endorsement of Kyoto, while at the same time urging standards for developing nations.
So there you have it. With McCain, Clinton and Obama getting most of the attention and most of the primary votes, on the issues relating to the environment, there is no gulf separating them.
And you thought the November general election would be easy?
